


Not the grieving kind

by TheWrongKindOfPC



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Gen, Multi, but don't let that fool you it's still a rough time for everyone, including Georgie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-29
Updated: 2020-03-30
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:07:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 51,886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23384254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheWrongKindOfPC/pseuds/TheWrongKindOfPC
Summary: On a rainy day in 1988, Georgie Denbrough still has a harrowing experience, but he makes it through to have some other harrowing experiences after that, too.
Relationships: Ben Hanscom/Beverly Marsh, Bill Denbrough/Mike Hanlon, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 28
Kudos: 53





	1. one.

**Author's Note:**

> Sometimes fic is a love-letter to canon, sometimes it's a fist-fight. This story is what happened when I watched IT 2 in theaters on a whim at eleven o'clock at night last August and then proceeded to go back and watch the first movie, watch the miniseries, read the book, and then rewatch the movies and miniseries several times with as many friends as I could drag in front of the screen and rant to, spitting mad about how completely right some of the things about each incarnation were and how very very wrong others were. I've spent the better part of a year trying to tease out what it is about this story and these characters that I find so compelling, and which things about the story I just fundamentally disagree with, and this story is the result.
> 
> I have this whole story written and beta'd, but I literally never write in a way that lends itself to releasing in chapters, and I kind of want to lean into the novelty, so I'll be posting a chapter a day until it's all up. There are four real chapters and an epilogue. All the thanks in the world to Aria for the beta, the handholding, and the willingness to let me swear about Stephen King on far too regular a basis.

4)

During the two weeks after George Elmer Denbrough’s family brings him home from the hospital for the second time since his birth, his mother comes into Georgie’s room in the morning to check on him and finds his older brother Bill asleep there, too, curled up at the end of the bed. She sighs a little and ruffles Bill’s hair to wake him, but she doesn’t say a word about it. These first weeks after Georgie’s family bring him home from the hospital for the first time since his birth are, after all, also the weeks after Georgie doesn’t die, and the whole family is still reeling a little from the near miss, and from the horrific loss of Georgie’s arm.

When she continues to find Bill asleep in Georgie’s room after those first few weeks, however, her sighs start to grow a bit less indulgent, and her hair ruffles just a bit less patient. They’re all still shaken by what happened to Georgie, but what Georgie needs is normalcy, not for Bill’s fears to reinforce his own. Without some kind of return to normal, how can Georgie be expected to move on? It was a horrible thing that happened, a horrible not-actually-an-accident, but that’s life: occasionally rife with horrible surprises. The important thing is that Georgie is alive. The important thing is to be able to move on. Besides, there’s hardly room for Bill in Georgie’s room these days, between Georgie and Georgie’s things and, now, all of the boats.

2)

Bill starts making the boats at the hospital. He wonders, as he carefully folds the sixty-third, Georgie’s quiet, serious eyes trained on Bill’s practiced fingers, if it should feel strange or morbid to do so. The boats, which Georgie found instructions for folding in an old _Boy’s Own_ magazine on that fateful rainy day before he’d been hurt, were clearly tainted by everything that had happened after Georgie had gone scrambling after the _S.S. Georgie_ in his bright yellow slicker and galoshes. But for some reason, folding out more boats for Georgie doesn’t _feel_ tainted. 

Instead, it feels a little bit like it had felt to make Georgie the first one: like Bill is big and smart and capable, and can give Georgie something he wants. More than that, though, it somehow feels like _protecting_ Georgie, in a strange way. It shouldn’t, Bill is fairly sure; the boat didn’t do anything to save Georgie when the _thing_ happened, after all. But making the boats is one of the only things that makes the horrible roaring emptiness in Bill’s chest quiet when he thinks about Georgie’s screaming through the walky-talky, or about pelting down the stairs and out into the rain barefoot in his pajamas, numb and stumbling and frantic from Georgie’s cries.

Mostly, Bill thinks, it probably feels right to make the boats because Georgie wants him to. When Georgie had first woken up in the hospital, groggy from his first surgery, some of the first words out of his mouth had been, “Sorry, Billy.”

Bill, who had been quiet in his shock since the ambulance door closed behind Georgie, and the paramedic promised Bill that he’d take care of Bill’s little brother while Bill waited with the nice police officer until someone reached his father — his mother had, by that point, already been in the ambulance with Georgie — Bill heard Georgie apologize, and the quiet in his head broke into a sob.

“You don’t have to be sorry about anything, sweetheart,” the boys’ mother told Georgie, running her fingers over his forehead.

“I lost it, Billy,” Georgie persisted, voice fuzzy and distressed. Bill wasn’t sure whether he’d actually noticed the loss of his arm yet. “He took my boat, I lost it.”

That had been almost too much for Bill, who hadn’t been quite sure whether he was crying or laughing when he’d replied, “It’s okay, Georgie, it’s just a boat, it’s alright.”

Georgie had subsided at the time, and had drifted off to sleep again shortly after, but he’d returned to the subject after a few hours of fitful sleep.

That time, Bill had again promised Georgie that he wasn’t upset about the loss of the boat, but when Georgie had continued to be so _upset_ , he had darted off to the front desk of the urgent care ward to beg a piece of scrap paper, promising his brother, “It’s okay, Georgie, I can make you another.”

When he’d handed the new boat to Georgie, carefully shepherding the paper triangle into the small fingers of Georgie’s remaining hand, Georgie’s frantic breathing had started to slow.

“See?” Bill had asked senselessly. “Good as new.” He’d felt himself carefully training his eyes away from the place where Georgie’s arm had been, and just as carefully redirected himself until he was looking at his brother straight-on.

Georgie was still looking down at the new boat. He smiled. And then he had asked, “Will you make me another one, Billy?”

“I’ll make you as many boats as you want,” Bill had promised, voice wavering into a stutter over the last word, promising with all of the seriousness in his thirteen-year-old soul, which, given the kind of thirteen-year-old Bill Denbrough was, was a considerable amount.

Bill hasn’t come to regret promising Georgie as many boats as he asks for, but in the days that follow, the number of boats he found himself folding were extensive enough that they might have made a brother less devoted, or less guilty and terrified, tremble.

“I’m running out of paper,” Bill tells Eddie Kaspbrak five days later, over the crackling line of the payphone outside the East wing of the hospital. 

Bill is talking to Eddie on the phone today, as he has on all other days since Georgie was brought to the hospital, rather than any of his other friends, not just because Eddie is his oldest friend and was his first, instinctive call, but also because Eddie’s mom worries in a way that Bill has never known anyone else’s parents to worry, and so Eddie knows hospitals well. He’s already tipped Bill off about the best vending machines and the worst night nurses. He’s also only calling Eddie because— because—

Bill isn’t ready to talk about what he saw — or thought he saw — retreating back into the sewers when he came running at the sound of Georgie’s screams. He isn’t ready to talk about what he heard — or thought he heard — in the walky-talky that had sent him running after Georgie to begin with. And he certainly isn’t going to talk about what he thought he saw when he looked into the cab of the ambulance as it was driving Georgie away. He _isn’t_. _But_.

But if Bill _was_ going to talk about any of these things, it wouldn’t be first to Stan, who would dismiss them out of hand for being impossible, or Richie, who would be unable to resist joking about Big Bill going off the deep end, and also so uncomfortable at the sincerity and upset Bill would be unable to hide that the joking would take on a manic edge to compensate. Eddie, on the other hand, can be sensible like Stan, but he understands that sometimes the world is scarier than it is sensible. And Eddie can give as good as he gets when Richie runs his mouth, but he’s also a better listener. Yes, if Bill were going to talk about anything he saw or heard the day Georgie was hurt, Eddie wouldn’t be a bad person to talk to.

Eddie is also resourceful, Bill reflects as Eddie offers, “I can bring you more paper, that’s no problem, I’ll get Richie to give me the rest of his origami set.”

The origami set, not much more than a book and a stack of brightly colored, delicately patterned paper, had been a misguided gift from Richie’s aunt who lived in New York, and who thought that maybe if Richie could be compelled to channel some of his wild, kinetic energy into the endlessly, meditatively repetitive art of folding shapes into paper, he might start to develop a better sense of patience and focus.

Only Stanley knew that Richie had, actually, tried. He’d spent an afternoon with the instruction booklet and a stack of paper, restlessly clicking between stations on the radio and fitfully folding along the lines described in the book. Only Stanley knew that the afternoon had resulted in one small-necked, wonky-winged crane, a pile of crumpled paper, and, very nearly, tears. But the rest of Richie’s friends — Eddie and Bill, not an extensive roster — were aware that for months since, Richie’s notes passed in class and enthusiastic-but-clumsy paper airplanes had all been folded from delicately fantastical patterns on square sheets of paper which Richie blithely continued to produce and strew behind him in a seemingly endless supply.

Still. “Do you think he’d mind?” Bill asks.

“He’d fucking better not,” Eddie hisses, all reflexive anger over a non-existent threat. Eddie’s brand of furious affection is especially comforting to Bill in the face of his mother’s vague, vacant warmth lately, which has replaced her first wave of hysterics beside Georgie in the ambulance. His mother’s lost look is something new, nothing Bill knows how to parse. Eddie’s defensive kindness, on the other hand, is business as usual.

What’s unexpected, from Eddie, is the way his voice drops to something a little softer for what he says next: “He’s not gonna mind, Bill. He’s gonna — he’ll be glad when I tell him something he can do to help. He and Stan ask me every day if I’ve heard from you.”

Bill sighs. “I should call them.”

“That’s not what I’m saying, okay?” Eddie snaps, sighing gustily before blurting out, “They just care about you, alright? We all do.”

Bill pauses at that, curiously touched. They don’t talk too much about things like that, he and his friends. The declaration, age six and whispering under the covers at a sleepover, that Eddie was his best friend had been the nearest — and most recent — admission. If pressed, Bill might have admitted that he loved Eddie, and Richie and Stan, his mismatched troupe of losers he made his way through the schooldays with, and then roamed the streets on bikes beside after. He would even, if asked with the right combination of kindness and persistence, have admitted to knowing that his friends loved him, too; they were his _friends_ , after all, and more than that, they looked to him for some kind of leadership to hold them together, although none of them, least of all Bill, would have verbalized that part of their connection. But it’s a shock to hear Eddie say it, and Bill thinks Eddie is shocked, too, to hear the words leave his mouth, and they both pause for a second, afterward.

But Eddie isn’t someone who can sit in silence long. “Anyway, I can drop the origami paper by your house or by the hospital tomorrow on my way to school. Don’t worry, I won’t let Richie come.”

Bill doesn’t mention how far out of the way to school the hospital is from Eddie’s house. Instead, he laughs a little and agrees, “Yeah, an early-morning Trashmouth visit is the last thing the Urgent Care ward needs.”

When Eddie speaks again, it’s back in that odd, careful tone. “He's still in Urgent Care, Bill?”

“Yeah. They’re probably going to transfer him tomorrow, but they wanted to be sure he’d stabilized after the last surgery first.” After another weird pause, Bill says, “I think my quarters are about to run out.” It isn’t true, but he trusts Eddie not to mind or call him on it right now.

“Sure, Bill. I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”

“Say hi to the guys for me.”

“’Course.”

3)

Everyone at Derry High who cares enough to know these things knows that Eddie Kaspbrak and Bill Denbrough have been best friends since one of them plopped down next to the other on a bench beside the playground at age five, watching the other kids play chasing games, one wistfully and the other with a mild confusion over the appeal of the melee. Everyone who bothers to know the friendship patterns of the least popular members of the sixth grade class at Derry High also knows that Richie Tozier and Stan Uris are best friends and have been since one of them popped a double-bubble of grape Double Bubble in the other one’s face at age seven, and after the yelling and crying and slap-fighting was done, both came out of it with their very first summons to the Principal’s office.

Everyone who cares to know these things knows them, and they’re broadly true, but they’ve also shifted in the years since all four boys, at nine years old, were seated together near the window of Ms. Detwiler’s class in September, and proceeded to make five times as much trouble together as any of them had at any other point in their scholastic careers, including Richie Tozier. Since that time, the four of them have been, if not inseparable, at least closer than they are to anyone else, and at this point it’s also true that while Bill Denbrough may not officially be Stanley Uris’s _best friend_ , he _is_ the only one of the four of them that Stan can bring with him on bird-watching walks without scaring off all the wildlife. And while Eddie Kaspbrak would tell anyone who asks that Bill Denbrough is his best friend, it’s Richie Tozier that he feels he can let the wildest parts of his personality out with, and Richie who makes him laugh the most often, even if it’s usually grudging, behind-his-hands laughter.

Still, there are some things that everyone who bothers to know these things knows, and one of them is that Bill Denbrough and Eddie Kaspbrak are best friends, so when Bill Denbrough misses more than a week of school to trail around the hospital after something so horrible most people’s parents will only whisper about it happened to his baby brother, it’s Eddie that everyone in school knows to ask about it.

Bill certainly doesn’t know it, but in the days and first weeks after Georgie is hurt, Bill enjoys a certain amount of minor celebrity amongst the sixth and seventh grade classes at Derry High. Everyone in school has heard a different rumor about what happened to Georgie’s arm, and what Bill did or didn’t do to save him, and everyone wants to hear at least six more rumors before the end of third period.

At first Eddie, who everyone knows is Bill’s best friend, and therefore, everyone suspects, must have the best dirt, almost enjoys a bit of the attention, in a furtive, guilty way. The day after Georgie was hurt, when Eddie went to the pharmacy to pick up his prescriptions, instead of popping her gum at him contemptuously over a magazine, Gretta Keane had come over to ask about Bill and about Georgie, and if there was any news. Even knowing she was asking out of curiosity rather than concern, Eddie had found himself enjoying the way she’d looked at him; like he might know something valuable to her.

At first, the interest of the crowd clustered around Eddie at the lunch table seems like the same kind of validation; Eddie Kaspbrak might be small and asthmatic and prone to panic, might be nerdy and kind of annoying, but he also might _know something_. But, a couple of minutes after sitting down, Eddie is already starting to feel like being someone who might _know something_ isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

“Bowers says you’re full of shit, Kaspbrak,” Jason Herriot says. “He says Denbrough’s a fucking pussy, he didn’t do _shit_ to save the kid before the cops came along, he was crying like a little bitch when the cops found him.”

Eddie is pretty sure he never claimed anything about what Bill did or didn’t do when he found Georgie, he thinks he just said that Bill was the one who found him, but that’s not the part of the sentence that actually bothers Eddie. Much worse is the implication that someone has been talking to Henry Bowers about him, or about Bill. Bowers is out to get Eddie and his friends enough already, the last thing they need is other people to keep on bringing them to Bowers’ attention.

Eddie wasn’t there, and he doesn’t know what Bill seemed like when the cops came to find him and Georgie. He doesn’t want to argue about it, but he also doesn’t want to sit around and let Jason fucking Herriot, of all people, trash Bill during one of the worst weeks of Bill’s life, so it’s almost a relief when he hears Richie come up to the table from behind him.

“These guys bothering you, Eds?”

There’s something a few beats off about the cadence as he says it, a kind of swagger that makes it clear that Richie is doing A Voice, even if that Voice sounds enough like Richie Tozier that it’s impossible to tell what he’s meant to be doing an impression _of_. Something new, Eddie thinks. Not one of the slight variants on the way Richie always sounds that he’s familiar with.

Richie isn’t _towering_ , where he’s standing a few steps back from the lunch table — he’s taller than Eddie, yes, but then, most people are, and though he’s gangly, he’s certainly not even the tallest guy in their grade. But there’s something there, in the not-quite-Voice, and in the way he’s holding his hands on his hips, rather than just letting them dangle like he’s forgotten he has hands as soon as he’s not actively using them — something that’s not _intimidating_ — it’s still Richie, after all — but which might make its way into the neighborhood of intimidating, if it eats its spinach and grows up big and strong.

Eddie smiles, then looks back at Sophie Thibodeuax and Laurent and Jason Herriot who has been talking to Henry Bowers, and Andrew Davis who shoved in front of Eddie in the lunch line last week, and then laughed when Eddie said _no cutsies_. Now, though, Eddie is closest to the biggest story in town and Andrew is acting like they’re buddies. He looks back at Richie again not by turning his head back, but by tilting it and craning his neck over backwards, so that by the time he meets Richie’s eyes again, Richie is upside-down.

“Maybe,” Eddie answers his question belatedly, “But you’re always bothering me, so I’m used to it.”

Back at the table, Eddie can hear Betsy Newsome snorting, “Always so fucking weird,” and dragging Sophie back with her to their usual table. Yeah, Richie is kind of a freak, but it’s kind of useful, his reputation for being so, _so_ annoying. By the time Eddie flips himself back right-side up to face the table again, as Richie lopes his way over to take his seat across from Eddie, the rest of Eddie’s audience is gone like it was never there.

“So the hand-off was successful, agent?” Richie asks in a version of The British Guy that Eddie is fairly sure is supposed to be out of a Bond movie. Eddie doesn’t actually mind The British Guy so much, as long as he doesn’t come out in class, or when Eddie’s trying to focus, or where Eddie’s mom can hear. The British Guy doesn’t have any more realism than any of Richie’s other voices, but at least he doesn’t feel vaguely racist, like the Pancho Vanilla voice, and he never makes Eddie feel kind of weird and squirmy, like the way the Southern Belle voice occasionally, mortifyingly, does when she sounds a little too swooney or a little too sincere.

It does feel a little weird to hear Richie using one of the voices when asking about Bill, with how serious everything that just happened with Bill’s family is, but Bill isn’t here to hear it, and Richie did just save Eddie from that pack of ambulance chasers, partially by just being his usually, obnoxious self, but partially on purpose, even. Instead of complaining about The British Guy, Eddie just nods.

“Yeah, he met me outside, so I didn’t see his parents or Georgie or anything.” 

Eddie pauses there, not sure how to go on without either making shit up or revealing too much about how out of his depth he’d felt. Eddie has been to the hospital a thousand times for a thousand different reasons, but other than those early, half-remembered visits to see his dad way back when, he can’t remember another time when he’s been there because something bad _has happened_ or _is happening_. He pauses, and any time there’s a gap in the conversation, there’s a good chance Richie will fill it — _IF you know what I mean, am I right, boys?_ the Richie who lives in Eddie’s head chimes in — but in person, sitting across the lunch table from Eddie today, Richie is quiet. When he speaks again, he sounds almost hesitant. “And how did — how did he seem?”

“His _brother_ almost got ripped apart, numbnuts, how do you think he seemed?”

Eddie actually has no idea how Bill seemed, or how he’s doing. He talks to Bill whenever Bill calls, and he tries to be, like, nice — and no matter what his first grade teacher said, _nice_ has never been Eddie’s strong suit — but Bill is always so _calm_ , even now. Eddie is supposed to be Bill’s best friend, but he’s not sure he knows any more about what’s going on inside Bill’s head than the nurse who brushed past them this morning on her way to a quick smoke break as Eddie dropped off Richie’s origami paper does.

Richie is still weirdly subdued, big bug-eyes behind those fishbowl glasses cast down, picking at his sandwich. “Bill says thank you for the paper, though,” Eddie tries, a little desperately. He’s painfully aware that both Georgie and Bill are having a much worse week than he is right now, but at this moment, at this lunch table, two of Eddie’s three best friends feel strange and out of reach, and the third — “Where is Stanley, anyway?” Eddie asks.

Richie takes a big bite of his sandwich before responding around a mouthful of turkey and cheese, “Freeport with his dad. Some kinda fuckin’ Rabbi convention where they all talk about how there are, like, three of them in Maine, and they bring Stanley to round out the numbers.”

Eddie doesn’t know much about Stan’s religion except that it means that Stanley occasionally misses school for weird holidays, and that wearing a kippah is like wearing a target on his back for Bowers and his gang. Stan’s dad is also kind of an asshole, but Eddie thinks that’s probably not related.

Richie is ostensibly also Jewish, or at least, as Richie says, half-way. Eddie doesn’t know anyone else who talks about religion like that, like you can be half Jewish and half Christian like you can be half Italian and half French-Canadian — or, if you’re Richie, half Jewish and half French-Canadian — but he’s not Jewish like Stan is Jewish. As Eddie understands it, this is because Stan’s family is Jewish in the same way that Eddie’s second cousin who says she plans to become a nun is Catholic, while Richie is Jewish in the same way that Eddie and his mom are Catholic; mostly just on holidays and when there’s a death in the family.

“Sucks,” Eddie ventures, fairly sure that’s the appropriate response.

“Yeah,” Richie agrees, then actually deigns to finish chewing before finishing his sentence. “Stanley says it’s about us, too. Derry. _Spiritual guidance in difficult times_.”

He says the last thing like he’s making fun, a little. Like he isn’t scared that they still haven’t caught the thing — person — _thing_ that did what it did to Georgie. Amy Harvey says they still haven’t found Georgie’s arm yet. It’s like it’s disappeared — or been _eaten_.

5)

Like a lot of things — tree roots, slang words, feelings — the sewer system in Derry isn’t isolated; it makes connections. Old Man Williams’ old homestead may have been abandoned since the last of his children left town for the big city lights of Augusta in the ‘50s, but the drainage system on his house is also connected to Derry’s main sewer line, and his water main came from the other direction, because he was always stubborn about making sure his property stayed suspended between two different town lines. And if he sometimes acted with a fury that didn’t seem quite his own, and if his son Jeremiah, who grew up in that house, turned out kind of funny, moved out into the woods and built himself a little house with no pipes and no modern amenities, well, these kinds of things happened, even in good, respectable families like the Williamses. And if you follow the pipes in and out of that old house where no one’s living, you can draw an indirect but unbroken line between the old Derry well-house and the restaurant in downtown Freeport where Stan Uris is seated quietly beside his father, trying to be a credit to his family and his community by not making weird jokes or getting distracted by the round brown sparrows picking at the grass out the window.

“And young Stanley must be almost a man by now,” Saul from Portland says, and Stan tries not to look startled at the sound of his own name. He’s been thinking about Bill, a little, in the back of his mind, and about how Georgie’s lucky he’s got Bill for a big brother. Stanley doesn’t know what _he’d_ do, in a situation where there was real danger and real consequences. _I’m just a kid_ , he’s thinking as his dad starts talking about the preparations for Stan’s Bar Mitzvah, but then, _Bill’s just a kid, too, and look at him._

It’s no secret, at least amount their little group of friends, that there’s something kind of special about Bill Denbrough. He’s got all the most interesting ideas for what to do, and he never seems quite afraid of the things that should scare him. He’ll acknowledge the real risks of things like skipping class, or riding a bike home after dark in the fall when frost has started to appear on the ground, but if he really wants to do something, he doesn’t let that acknowledgement stop him. Stan thinks that this tendency doesn’t have anything to do with age, or maturity, or being a man, and that he could probably live a hundred years and have seven Bar Mitzvahs without ever affecting anything like it in himself. And it’s because he’s thinking of Bill, he’ll tell himself later, that he thinks he sees what he thinks he sees, staring out the restaurant window and not listening as his father acknowledges to his colleagues that Stanley is growing up.

It’s a bit like a magic eye picture in a book in the dentist’s office — it’s not that Stanley is looking somewhere else, and then when he looks over to where _it_ is, he sees it. It’s more like he’s staring into the gutter outside, eyes fixed on the brown leaves piled there, and the cracked asphalt beneath, and as he’s staring, one of the shapes his eyes are resting on resolves itself into an arm — a little boy’s arm, Stanley thinks for no particular reason.

He startles, but doesn’t speak or give any physical sign besides a slight jolt in his shoulders, which is convenient because then he doesn’t have to explain it away later, and then he blinks and looks back and — yes, an arm. Pale and greenish with blood-loss, and with a yellowing knob of what looks like bone, sticking out from where it should attach to a shoulder. And then, as he’s watching, another arm stretches out of the storm drain to grab the first arm — _Georgie’s arm_ , and then drag it into the storm drain.

When Stanley looks up again, his father has moved on to talking about a problem with a synagogue’s roof.

6)

Bev Marsh knows all about what happened to Bill Denbrough’s baby brother. She was smoking in the stall of the third-floor girls’ bathroom in the science wing when Amy Harvey, the sheriff’s deputy’s niece, told Gretta Keane and the rest of the field hockey team all about it.

“Uncle Ray said the kid was just, like, _dripping_ with blood,” Amy said, voice full of a weird sort of off-kilter relish that made Bev’s skin crawl more than the imagined image of the bloody six-year-old does.

Bev likes Bill well enough, is the thing — he was her first kiss, if you count a stage kiss between two third-graders as a kiss at all, which Bev generally doesn’t, but _still_. There’s something there that feels like a connection. Amy Harvey talks about Bill Denbrough, in rain-soaked pajamas, dragging his bleeding little brother onto a neighbor’s porch and yelling until they called the police, and Bev feels her heart seize up. It’s two weeks after what happened to Georgie before Bill shows up at school again. By then, the story of what happened (and plenty of stories Bev is pretty sure didn’t happen) have circulated the school often enough that the rumor mill has done its usual work of picking a hero, hyping him till he could never have possibly done all the good things he was said to have, then blaming him for being over-hyped until he had been ripped down off the pedestal to a step or two below where he started.

Bev spends as much time hiding in the bathroom and slipping down the hall and out the doors of the school during class when the halls are quiet after Bill Denbrough comes back to school as she did before, but when she _is_ in class, she tries to keep a little bit of an eye on him. He’s always been a little picked on, but in the past it has generally been in an impersonal, reflexive way — he was lower on the food chain, so he’d take his lumps, but he didn’t really make any waves, so there was nothing personal about it. The only ones of Denbrough’s little group who tend to really get it from Bowers and his gang are the Jewish one and Richie Tozier, who never shuts up.

When Bill gets back to school, though, there’s something weird about the blood-in-the-water feeling of the way he falls into the social hierarchy. It’s like no one wants to be the first one to pick on the kid who may have done something kind of heroic, but he’s also still a nerdy little werido, and his friends are both nerdier and weirder, and it’s inevitable that they’ll end up back near the bottom of the pecking order.

Bev can’t really afford to pay too much attention to anyone else’s social problems; she’s got enough trouble just watching her own back. At least Denbrough has his friends, that little pack of shrimpy boys who take turns standing up for each other and launching each other into trouble when someone can’t manage to keep his head down. Bev’s just got herself, really — and Mrs. Phillips, sort of, the art teacher who lets Bev hide out in her classroom during her free period and after school sometimes, and will give her credit for an art independent study for it, as long as Bev occasionally puts a number 2 pencil to a piece of scrap paper and doodles a little.

Bev draws dresses, sometimes — strange, impractical contraptions that people would only wear if they felt completely and totally safe, if they never felt the need to run from anyone, or to hide a single mark on their skin. Mrs. Phillips also pretends not to notice if Bev smokes out a window while Mrs. P is at a staff meeting after school, and once in a blue moon, if Mrs. P puts her head down on a desk in frustration, she’ll allude quietly to her divorce, and warn Bev to be careful about the parts of herself she gives away. Mostly, though, Bev is on her own.

And maybe it’s because Bill Denbrough isn’t, that it takes nearly two weeks since he’s been back at school before he becomes the target of any ugliness again. Bev usually skips lunch, so it’s only by chance that she’s there to witness it this time, instead of hearing other people gossiping about it later, but today is tater tot day, and Bev hasn’t had much of an appetite over dinners with her dad lately, so she figures she’ll slip in, grab a tray, scarf a few bites, then slip out of the Caf while everyone else is still eating. She’s intent enough on her task that she thinks the confrontation has probably been under-way for a few minutes when she hears Bill Denbrough’s distinctive stutter calling out, “G-g-g-ive it _back_.”

Of course, they’ve got the smallest one of Denbrough’s little posse’s fanny pack, and Hockstetter is riffling through it.

“Calm down, _Billy_ , just making sure your little friend’s not holding out on us. Holy shit, kid, you’ve got a whole pharmacy in here, is this even legal?” Hockstetter says, shaking a day-of-the-week pill organizer so it rattles. “C’mon, kid, got any ‘ludes?”

The kid — and Bev could have told him this would go badly, but the kid in the polo shirt looks so spitting mad she’s also sure telling him so wouldn’t have helped — actually _jumps_ for the pill box, and it’s this jump that has him off-balance enough that when Hockstetter shoves him backwards, he goes flying.

“Eddie!” one of Denbrough’s other buddies shouts. It's Richie Tozier who bummed a cigarette off of Bev last year while they were both skipping an assembly, and then practically hacked up a lung trying to smoke it, and as he’s shouting, he goes absolutely scrambling to get to his friend. Bev expects Denbrough to do the same, but instead he steps right up close to Hockstetter, and Bev thinks it should make him look stupid, or vulnerable, the way he gets right up in Hockstetter’s face, an entire head shorter than him, with that tousled little bowl cut, but instead, there’s something about the fury in his face that makes the hairs on Bev’s arms stand up.

Bev is on the other side of the room, so she thinks Denbrough is saying something, but she’s not sure what it is. Still, she’s pretty sure it’s the sight of Mr. Hall who teaches Precalc registering what’s going on from near where Bev is and making moves like he’s about to make his way over that has Hockstetter dropping the fanny pack into Denbrough’s hands and stalking away.

Denbrough’s friends make their way to their feet and wave Mr. Hall away, but Bill Denbrough doesn’t so much as turn around to acknowledge him; instead he keeps his eyes fixed on Patrick Hockstetter until he’s made his way back to his lunch table, sat down, and turned his entire attention away from the confrontation and towards flicking bits of green beans at Belch Huggins.

7)

Mike Hanlon doesn’t know much about what happened to the little Denbrough boy, although the bits of story he’s heard do cross his mind now and then as he’s biking through town making deliveries. What might have happened, to tear a little boy’s arm off like that, _just like a chicken wing_ , is a favorite subject for several of the hands on his grandfather’s farm for weeks after.

It’s upsetting when he thinks about it, some little kid in town getting ripped apart, and still no one knowing who or what did it, but Mike doesn’t have a lot of time to sit around and think about it. Spring is a busy time on a farm, and anyway, he’s found something more important.

Most of Mike’s parents things burned with the house, but his father grew up on the farm, and every once in a while, something that belonged to him gets dug out of a closet, or found discarded in a box of old papers. When he was young, Mike had hated the way his grandmother would bring him these relics, like an old report card or school picture would help him feel any more connected to a man Mike knew only from faded memories and awful rumors. The photo album is different, though — for one thing, Mike thinks he’d be interested in it even if it had nothing to do with his father at all.

“Your daddy always did have an interest in the history of the town,” Gram had explained, frowning down at the yellowed pages of the album. “Used to bike around to all the old yard sales and estate sales, waste his allowance on all kinds of old pictures and papers.”

Later, on his own, Mike paged through the album looking down not just at the small, blurred, sepia-toned images, but at the small, careful notations written underneath each one. The writing didn’t look like the loose, loping signature on Mike’s birth certificate; this was a responsible schoolboy’s serious, well-formed cursive making estimates about the year each photo was taken, guesses about who might be in it, and, curiously, counting out the number of years from certain events, stories Mike only heard people talking around, without ever hearing much about directly — the death of the Bradley Gang, the Kitchener Ironworks explosion, the fire at The Black Spot, that logger who massacred all those people.

Maybe two thirds of the way through the thick album, Mike comes to a blank page, and for a moment he thinks he’s reached the end, but when he flips it, he finds, not more photos or newspaper clippings, but dense pages on pages of notes. These notes aren’t in his father’s careful, schoolboy handwriting; they look more like the loose, personality-filled writing Mike has always associated with his father in the past. They’re written in a lot of shorthand, and include a lot of names, dates and addresses, some crossed out, so that it’s hard to find a narrative thread. They don’t look like any kind of notes Mike has seen before — certainly not notes for a class, since these look too frantic, almost unhinged. There’s an oddly meticulous record of what looks like every time a circus came through town over the course of the 1900s, complete with the names and jobs of what seem to have been circus performers, some circled, some crossed out. And in one corner of the last page, connected to what looks like a convoluted flowchart, Mike spies what seems to be his own name, _Mikey???_ written large and circled.

So no, Mike hasn’t been thinking too much about the Denbrough brothers, no matter what the town rumor-mill has chosen to focus on about them.

8)

Arlene Hanscome thinks maybe she never made a bigger mistake in her life than moving to Derry. She’s not sure what else she could have done — she needs the help, and the grudging help of a sister is better than the cold, dependent, shameful help of the state, or so her parents always said. Three months into being _helped_ by Lucy, and her taciturn husband who Arlene has never managed to get along with, and Lucy’s boys, so much more cheerful and more social than Arlene’s poor Ben, and Arlene is starting to question whether a little chilly, shameful help of the state to keep them to a Christmas-card relationship with Arlene’s sister wouldn’t have been better after all.

Ben is doing well in school — Ben always does well in school, that’s no surprise, Arlene’s boy is a quick thinker and a good listener, and she’s never had any trouble with him before now that he’s sharing a room with his cousins. Lucy says it’s because Ben’s an only child and an oddball to boot, and so he doesn’t know how to share a space with her boys, but then, Lucy affects not to see her boys teasing Ben about everything from what he wears to what he eats to where he goes after school, and even if teasing is natural among boys their age, Arlene is certain that two against one is never fair. Ben is doing well in school, but the school claims that his mid-semester move into their class puts him beside his classmates, so they’re requiring that he takes summer classes to catch up. Ben is understandably upset about this, and she thinks it might be about more than his grades — some unpleasantness with one of the other boys in summer classes — but he also knows there isn’t much she can do about it for him.

All this she could take, not comfortably, but at least with some calm, because that’s the world, and it isn’t _fair_ that her Ben has to learn it so much earlier than many other children, but she thinks it will probably serve him well eventually. But when the little boy from across town is attacked, Arlene really starts to wonder if she’s made a mistake.

She’s never _liked_ Derry — she’s always found something kind of off about it, and she’s had a much harder relationship with Lucy since Lucy moved here, which she knows is hardly the town’s fault, but she can’t help but notice the connection. But there’s something eerie about the practiced way the town puts the curfew into place, after that little boy is attacked, and about how no one seems to know what could have done that. Arlene keeps thinking horrible, ridiculous things — alligators in the sewers, cannibals — and the fact that it came so soon after that other dead little boy, the Corcoran one, feels suspicious too, although when she voices this, Lucy pulls her aside and explains that most people think the Corcoran boy’s step-father was responsible for that. Somehow, the knowledge that the whole town seems to have been holding the secret of the death of another little boy makes her feel even worse — it _shouldn’t_ be unconnected.

So Arlene buys Ben a watch and makes him promise to always be home by dinner, not to go off by himself when he’s walking through town after school. She also subscribes to more newspapers in Augusta, in Portland, in Bangor, combing the personals for job listings and mailing out applications every night after work. She’s going to get Ben out of this town alive if it’s the last thing she does.

30)

Bill Denbrough can’t write endings to his books to save his life. That’s okay, though, because he has Georgie to do it for him. 

“Neatness, closure — that’s not what real life is like, Georgie,” Bill tells his brother, with all the bombast and conviction that made him enemies of the entire creative writing department of UMO in college.

Georgie doesn’t back down, though, and he doesn’t give Bill an “F” on a story that will fetch a decent fee in a trashy magazine, and he doesn’t pressure Bill to drop his course — in short, Georgie doesn’t oppose Bill in a way that sets off his stubbornness. Instead, he just giggles like he’s twelve again and says, “But this _isn’t_ real life, Billy, it’s a story about a giant eyeball,” and even though Bill and Georgie are two of eight people in the world to know exactly how real a giant eyeball can be, Bill is forced to concede the point.

So the giant eyeball is finished off with an appropriate amount of dramatic irony, and Georgie hangs over Bill’s shoulder as he edits and makes some very good suggestions, and a few months later, Georgie has a co-author credit and the Denbrough brothers have an agent for their first full length novel.

“It feels almost too easy,” Bill tells Mike, leaning over the library counter and into Mike’s space as Mike takes a furtive lunch break during story time in the children’s room. “All you ever hear out there is how hard it is to make it, but as soon as I had Georgie helping me, Andrew wanted to represent us, and he’s trying to get us to move to New York.”

“Are you going to go?” Mike asks like it’s a casual question, like they haven’t carefully spent the course of their college careers sticking close to each other and testing the boundaries of the forgetting that starts as soon as you leave town. Bill thinks if both he and Mike hadn’t been at school so close, driving home on weekends and spending the weeks side by side, and if he hadn’t had Georgie’s phone calls every few days, he might have forgotten already.

“Of course not,” Bill tells him, because they may not talk much about the reason the three of them are still in Derry, but if Mike is feeling insecure, Bill is willing to say the words out loud. “We’ve got a more important job than writing cheap thrills for the masses.”

“It only takes one lighthouse keeper to keep the lights on,” Mike says, though, weird and tense and insistent and also, Bill is fairly sure, factually inaccurate.

“Think there’s a reason they usually have at least two of those,” Bill counters, “And that’s so the lighthouse keeper doesn’t go crazy with solitude.”

They’ve been weirdly solemn for the last minute and a half, and Bill feels the relief of a break in the tension when Mike smiles. “I think it’s pretty clear that we grew up a ways inland,” he says.

“So what you’re saying is that we shouldn’t use a lighthouse as the setting for my and Georgie’s next book,” Bill teases, pleased to have moved on from the weird solemnity of the previous moment, but Mike doesn’t seem quite ready to let it go.

“I’m saying, I think something doesn’t want you to stay in this town, and there might be no second book deal if you don’t take this chance when it’s offered.”

“You think it’s like—” For some reason, Bill hasn’t considered the possibility that this chance of his and Georgie’s might be somehow comparable to the prestigious internship Ben’s aunt was heard bragging about in the supermarket last week, or the breakout success of Bev’s clothing line’s first collection.

“I’m not saying you’re not _good_ , Bill, I’m not saying you and George don’t deserve the success,” and yes, Mike probably knows Bill a bit too well by now, to so easily verbalize the most embarrassed and embarrassing aspect of Bill’s instinctive discomfort with the idea of supernatural input into his career. They’re in a town full of people, it’s true, and Bill and Georgie and Mike all have their own friends both within this town and outside of it, through college and work, but in some ways, the analogy about the isolated lighthouse keeper is a good one; in some ways they’re like castaways who have been locked on a deserted island with only each other for company for almost ten years and counting. “I’m just saying that if _It_ has an agenda, there’s no telling what kinds of carrots and sticks It’s going to throw at you to get what It wants. And there’s no reason for all of us to bury ourselves out here in the sticks. It only takes one person to call the others back.”

Bill thinks about it for a moment — really thinks about it, because Mike wouldn’t have mentioned it if he didn’t mean it, and if he hadn’t been thinking about offering for a long time. As if echoing his thoughts, Mike says, voice impossibly kind, “Think about it, Billy. Is this really what you want for Georgie for the rest of his life? Is this what you really want for yourself?”

For so many years, only Georgie has ever called him _Billy_ — it’s not something Eddie or Richie or Stan ever picked up when they were kids, but some time in the years that it’s just been the three of them, it has stopped feeling strange to hear the childish nickname from Mike, as well as from Bill’s little brother.

“Of course not,” Bill says, but he holds up a hand to show that he’s not done, gathering himself after the stutter over the last word before surging forward, “But it’s not a life I’d want for you, either, Mike, all things being equal. It started with me and George, and maybe it should end with us, too.” Bill meets Mike’s eyes, searching for any sign that Mike might take him up on the offer and finding, as expected, nothing but unshaking determination.

“You know you’re not the only ones drawn to this, whether you want it or not.”

Bill thinks of Mike’s dad’s album, the pages of notes he’s photocopied for safekeeping, but Bill can’t imagine that all that research was meant to _keep_ Mike here. If anything, he thinks all that careful notation was searching for a way _out_.

“What about Florida?” Bill asks. He’s actually been, once, when his parents moved down. It’s the furthest either he or Georgie has gone from Derry since _It_ , and neither of them like the squirmy-cold forgetting feeling that slips over them and away the closer or farther they get from town. Their parents come up to stay with them for a week or two most summers, these days, but they say they can’t take the Maine winters any longer. Mike hasn’t been further from town than U Maine Augusta since high school, and even then, he took most of his classes on the Bangor campus.

“It’ll still be there when all this is over,” Mike says, with a lazy certainty that Bill is sure he doesn’t feel. “Twenty-seven year cycle, right? And we’re just over ten down, so that’s just seventeen more.”

“Guess it’s time to make sure we’re really ready by the time it comes around, then, isn’t it?”

They’d done a bit of it, the research, in college, following up on Mike’s dad’s notes and digging through undergrad theses on local history and oral traditions, but for some reason it never clicked — one or the other of them would find something interesting, or something that felt like it fit, but it wouldn’t connect back to anything else, or it would lead to a dead-end. Now that Bill thinks about it, he wonders if there wasn’t some kind of push going on, like if he hadn’t had Georgie on the phone, and Georgie and Mike to drive back to Derry to see on weekends, he would have lost the thread of that line of thought entirely.

Mike hesitates like he might argue further, but Bill can’t _imagine_ he wants Bill to take him up on it. Being left alone in this town with no one to understand or remember the thing he’s fighting, just watching and waiting for the murders to begin again, sounds like a nightmare to Bill.

 _I’m not going to leave you alone,_ Bill thinks. He doesn’t know what he’s ever done to make Mike think he would. After a moment, Mike laughs, shakes his head, breaks eye contact. “I guess we’d better.”


	2. two.

9)

A few weeks later, the disappearances start.

If it had started with Eddie Corcran, no one would have been surprised; everyone knows Eddie C’s stepfather is a mean sonnovabitch, and that CPS would have been involved long ago if it wasn’t so damn hard to get a call to the state for help to stick, in Derry. It doesn’t, though — it starts with Betty Ripsom, who only moved into town two years ago when her mother moved them back in with her grandmother through her parents’ acrimonious divorce. 

Betty’s father is safely out in California with a solid alibi and an almost frantic concern for his missing daughter, so he’s a hard suspect to pin it on, and Betty is gone and she’s gone and she’s gone, but there’s no sign of a body, and everyone whispers about how there _wouldn’t be_ , would there, if it was the same thing that got Georgie, and _then_ Eddie C. goes missing too, and everyone whispers behind their hands that his stepfather got lucky, having Betty and George Denbrough to hide behind, but the truth is that it _works_ , at this point no one _is_ sure if it was him.

Eddie Kaspbrak knows Betty Ripsom a little — Eddie’s delicate, and you never know when a splinter you don’t notice yourself getting is going to get infected and turn your whole hand gangrenous, and so his mother insists that Eddie take Home Ec instead of shop, the only boy in his class to do so. Since Eddie is the only boy in the class, and Betty is new, they’d ended up being paired together for most projects throughout the year. Eddie liked Betty well enough, and he doesn’t like to think about what must have happened to her, especially now that he’s been spending time with Georgie again.

Actually, he and Richie and Stan have been spending more time with Georgie than ever before. The Denbrough brothers have never been the kind of siblings who are at each other’s throats, and sleepovers at Bill’s house have often involved Georgie joining in for movies or pizza, but in the past, Bill and Georgie have always had their own lives, their own friends, and their own plans, mostly.

Since Georgie has been home from the hospital, though, it’s like they can’t stand to be apart — which makes _sense_ , Eddie thinks, fiercely protective even inside his own mind against anyone who might judge. Today, for example, is the first day that Georgie has been back at school since _it_ happened — and that’s how Bill has been talking about it, so that’s how Eddie has been thinking about it, too: when _it_ happened, and no one knows exactly what _it_ was, still. Bill has been back in school for weeks now, but Georgie went back for the first time this morning, and now Eddie and Richie and Stan are all riding their bikes over to the elementary school behind Bill, because Bill is picking Georgie up after school, and, if Eddie’s being honest, he and Richie and Stan have been sticking close to Bill with some of the same nervous energy that Bill has been sticking to Georgie.

Bill has been very intense, is the thing, since he’s been back. Bill is always intense, maybe — teachers have always talked about what a _serious little boy_ he was, and it’s not because Bill doesn’t goof off or make trouble like any other kid, so Eddie thinks it must be because of the single-minded way he takes on every task that’s important to him. These days, for obvious reasons, that single-mindedness is centered around keeping an eye on Georgie.

It isn’t until they all cruise up to the elementary school playground, Stan fussily picking across the uneven ground to find a place level enough for his kickstand to really stand up, Bill impatiently tossing his two-year-too-small bike aside and striding out onto the playground like a man on a mission, Eddie and Richie somewhere in between, that the problem with riding over to pick up Georgie becomes clear. In the past, when Bill picked Georgie up, Georgie had either had his own little bike, training wheels just barely a thing of the past, or, if their mother hadn’t been home to see, had sometimes ridden double with Bill, balanced on the seat and clinging to his brother’s back in a bear hug. Neither is an option now, so the five of them make their way back to the Denbrough house from the elementary school on foot, wheeling their bikes beside them.

“We need to get Billy-boy fitted out with a sidecar, posthaste!” Richie calls from where he’s hanging near the back of the pack of them, by Eddie. He says it like it’s one of his usual jokes, just spilling out of his mouth the way they always do, but Eddie saw the way Richie held back as Bill realized the impossibility of sticking Georgie on a bike with him, saw the awkward way he shoved his hands in his front pockets and didn’t say anything, and he thinks this is probably something Richie is saying to sound normal, rather than something that actually is.

Georgie swings around to look at him, stopping in the middle of the sidewalk, and asks, “Like on a motorcycle? Like in _The Great Escape_?”

“Just exactly like, young Georgington!” Richie says, and Georgie giggles. He really is kind of an amazing kid, Eddie thinks. “If there’s anyone here who can out-bike Nazis, it’s Sir Billiam, here.”

Bill ducks his head, smiling a little, and Eddie thinks, yeah, sometimes Richie is pretty good to have around.

They’re planning on spending the afternoon at Bill’s, as they have for most of the last month; they’ve played a heck of a lot more Monopoly than Eddie has ever wanted to, but Georgie’s hand situation makes games with cards difficult, and the last time they tried Hide and Seek, Bill looked like he was going to pass out when he couldn’t find Georgie fast enough, and they’re not going to try to play any games that might get rough with a recently injured eight year old. But Eddie’s pretty sure he’s not the only one who’s starting to go a little stir-crazy, and he gets confirmation when Stanley suggests they walk home through the park so he can see if he can catch a look at some — something. Some kind of rare woodpecker thing, and Eddie doesn’t normally listen to Stan that closely when he’s talking about birds, but a walk sounds nice.

“N-n-no,” Bill says.

Georgie, who Eddie thinks must be feeling even more shut in than the rest of them, since he’s only just gone back to school, and he’s spent any time the rest of them weren’t playing endless rounds of Monopoly and Sorry! stuck in the house with the TV, probably in a certain amount of pain, says, “ _Please_ , Billy, I want to see the, um, the, uh,” and he turns back to Stan who mouths the name of the bird out for him, “The yellow-bellied sapsucker.”

“Sorry, G-g-g-georgie,” And Bill has always had a bit of a stutter, but Eddie doesn’t think he’s imagining things; it’s gotten worse since Georgie was hurt. “Mom and dad will be worrying, we’ve got to get home.” He turns back to Stan and Eddie and Richie. “You g-g-g-g-guys go on, though. I d-d-d-don’t m-m-mind.

But Georgie pipes up, “It’s Wednesday, mom works late on Wednesdays. And dad is never home till seven.”

“Th-they might be home early ‘cause it’s your first day,” Bill says, and Eddie glances over to where Stan looks deeply uncomfortable to be the cause of this argument.

“They won’t, they told me,” Georgie says, glaring up at Bill, in this moment exactly as stubborn as Bill has ever been. _Makes sense_ , Eddie thinks. _It makes sense that the only person who could ever stand up to Bill is mini-Bill_.

“We’re n-n-not going h-h-home through the p-p-p-park!” Bill snaps, and he’s already sounded emphatic, but the way his voice snaps makes all of them jump.

“Okay, woah there, Big Bill,” Richie says. “Nobody’s holding a gun to anybody’s head, I’m sure Stanny can look at the pretty birdies tomorrow.”

“Actually, we’re due for a seasonal shift any day now and—”

“Shut up, Staniel. What Stan _means_ is that we’re happy to escort you and half-pint home by whatever route you prefer in that crazy brain of yours, Billy boy, but Curious George has been nowhere but doctors’ offices, home, and school for, like, a month, and he’s probably forgotten what trees look like.”

“I _know_ what trees look like,” Georgie chimes, “There’s one right there!”

“Hush, you, I’m on your side here.”

“We’re not going through the _p-p-p-p-park_ ,” Bill says, and all of the sudden, Bill looks close to tears, Eddie shoots a _shut up_ look Richie’s way, but it sounds like it’s already too late, and Bill barrels on, “Ed Corcran used to take the long way home through the park and now he’s _missing_."

Eddie opens his mouth to respond, because someone’s got to, and it probably shouldn’t be Richie, who handles emotions about as delicately as a monster truck, but then he pauses, not sure quite how to respond. On the one hand it’s so blindingly stupid — Ed Corcran also took third period Gym, and you don’t see Eddie using that as an excuse to stop running laps — but _also_. Also they _don’t_ know what happened to Eddie C., and no one seems to know what happened to Georgie, either, and if Eddie had a little brother, he probably wouldn’t take risks with him, either. Eddie doesn’t even like to take risks with himself. So maybe it should be Richie who speaks up, Eddie thinks. At least Richie and his motor-mouth should be able to say _something_ in the face of Bill’s fear.

Instead, it’s Georgie, and Georgie says something that shouldn’t be terrifying, shouldn’t be the worst thing Eddie has heard all day, but as soon as he hears it, somehow _is_. “It’s okay, Billy,” Georgie says. “It’s sunny out. The clown only comes out of the storm drains when it’s dark.”

“What?” Stan asks, and it sounds breathless, horrible.

“The clown that ate my arm,” Georgie explains matter-of-factly. “He said he was in the sewer because the storm blew him away, and I hear him in the bath at night, but he never comes out in daylight.”

“The clown?”

Bill looks over his shoulder, back at Eddie and Stan and Richie, but away from George, and says, “The doctors say it’s a stress response, that he sees whatever attacked him as a clown. The police profiler who talked to him told dad it’s a pretty normal one in really, uh, really brutal cases.”

Georgie looks up at his brother and, again, he looks as stubborn as Bill ever has. “You know it was a clown, Billy, you saw it, too.”

Eddie cuts his gaze directly to Bill, to see how he responds to that, and he’s fast enough to catch Bill shuddering in response. “I don’t, uh. I d-d-don’t know. What I saw.”

It’s an admission, kind of; Eddie can see that. The safer thing, the saner thing, would be to say that Georgie doesn’t know what he’s talking about, that he’s just a scared little kid. The other safer thing would be to agree outright, in a way that lets all of them know that he’s humoring Georgie, but lets Georgie think he’s believed. This is neither of those, this is whatever has Bill scared to walk home through the park, one of the brightest, most supervised areas in town — although in theory, so is the lunch room at school, and Eddie thinks of that confrontation a few days ago with Patrick Hockstetter, how Eddie had really thought that Hockstetter was going to tear Bill apart, no consideration at all for the teachers who were actually in the room, and how Bill hadn’t backed down at all. Things that ought to be safe aren’t, always.

Georgie seems to know as well as Eddie does that, more than either agreement or denial would, Bill’s sentence puts him on Georgie’s side, because he nods in satisfaction. “Well, I know what I saw. I’m never going to forget it.”

Eddie is sure that’s true, but it’s also horrible. Bill seems to think so, too, because he turns back to both his brother and the original subject, and says, “But that doesn’t mean you know for sure. About the daylight. Just because you saw it.”

Georgie stares back at Bill, long and quiet, then says, “Okay, Billy. You can draw me a yellow-bellied bird-pecker instead.”

31)

In the beginning, following up on Mike’s dad’s research for good and all feels a little like _Indiana Jones_. That’s what Georgie says, anyway, and Bill’s never going to argue with the chance to compare himself to Harrison Ford and rewatch old adventure movies late into the night with his little brother and his best friend. Well. _One_ of his best friends.

It’s weird, now that college is over and Bill is living back in Derry, he feels the absence of the rest of them in the way he isn’t sure he really did in the ten years since that summer when they were lucky-seven-plus-Georgie. Some of it has to be the forgetting —college was strange, because Bill never went far enough to forget all the way, and any time he got close, he had a phone call from Georgie or a visit home to Georgie and Mike to remind him, but there was a fuzziness that would come when he was away from town for a while, and the dizzying clarity every time he went back and remembered again, and that strangeness must have distracted him a little, from the missing them. But there’s more to it than that, Bill thinks. College was always meant to be some kind of weird deviation from the real world, and now that it’s over, and Bill is supposed to be finding some kind of normalcy, some kind of adult life, and it feels strange to do so without them.

Bill’s entire childhood happened with Eddie by his side, and he has almost as many memories of Richie and Stan. After the summer of ’89, Ben and Mike were as much a part of them as if they’d always been there, until Ben moved, and the hole where Beverly had been had never stopped feeling strange and empty.

Back then when she’d first left, before any of them knew about the forgetting, Bill had assumed that her absence meant that she couldn’t possibly miss them the way they missed her — that she must have wanted a clean break from the madness of that summer, and from their nightmare hometown, and, by extension, from all of them, friends or not. Now that Bill has come close to forgetting himself a few times over, and now that he’s living without them all, he wonders if he was unfair to Bev back then. He wonders if she’s been lonely without them, too, and just not knowing what she was lonely for.

Indiana Jones has always felt like kind of a lone-wolf type, but Bill wonders vaguely if it’s by choice. Still, he’s pretty sure Indiana never spent nearly as much time as he has been lately in nursing homes talking to racist old people.

Bill knows they’re racist, because they’re usually re-visits of people Mike tried to talk to in college, when he thought Bill would leave town completely after school, and he’d be left as the only one who remembered or could prepare for the clown. He got some good interviews back then, and they’ve both spent some time poring over transcripts and notes, but when they really started to reach dead ends, Mike suggested that Bill might have better luck with some of the more stubborn people he tried to talk to in the past.

“I’m just saying,” Mike had _just said_ , “Some of them might not have wanted to talk to _me_ about who burned down The Black Spot, and why, and how.”

The awful thing is that he’s right, and Bill takes to these interviews with a kind of urgency after one of the men he’s supposed to talk to, 96 years old, dies in the time it takes between making an appointment to speak to him and actually getting there. Bill and George’s modest but growing reputation as horror writers is also helpful, when it comes to convincing people to talk to him. Mike, when Bill shares this thought, laughs and shakes his head. “Guess it doesn’t hurt,” he agrees, and Bill is fairly sure he’s being humored, but he finds he doesn’t actually mind, when it’s Mike.

Mike thinks Georgie’s _Indiana Jones_ comparison is hilarious, actually, and abuses his power as a librarian to pull the movies off the shelves and check them all out at once, despite the fact that the crumbling Derry histories he’s had checked out and overdue for several months now are still strewn over Bill and Georgie’s dining room.

“Okay, but which of us is Indy?” Mike asks Georgie as the first movie rewinds, because that’s exactly the kind of responsible Mike is; overdue books for a good cause, but all VHS tapes rewound as soon as he’s done watching them. Georgie looks delighted by the question, swinging his gaze back and forth between Mike and Bill on the couch.

“Mike,” he says, after a moment, decisively. “Sorry, Billy, but he’s just got a better face for the hat.”

Bill — would really like to argue with that, but he looks over at Mike’s strong, solid jawline, and he’s got to agree. Still, “Who does that make me? The Egyptian guy?” Indiana Jones isn’t a big sidekick guy, so the options aren’t extensive.

Georgie shakes his head decisively. “Nah, you’re Marion.”

Mike, beside Bill on the couch, tilts his head thoughtfully and says, “I guess you do have the alcohol tolerance to be her.”

It’s a very _Mike_ thing to say, in that it’s the kindest possible reading, the best one for letting Bill save face like Georgie hasn’t said something _eviscerating_ about the way Bill used to, well, _wonder_ about how he felt about Mike back in high school, when he’s bike out to the farm and Mike would be hard at work, sweat standing out on a body too defined for any high school kid, and Bill would look at him and _know_ that the thing that was making him stare was a little bit more than jealousy, or self-consciousness.

Bill does get drunk, actually — Mike is amazed by his tolerance, when they go out once in a blue moon, mostly to prove that they _can_ , now, that they’re not kids any more, and, more than that, that they’re a _part_ of this town, even if it’s always made Mike feel halfway-unwelcome, even if Bill has felt like sleeping with one eye open over it since he was thirteen years old. Bill matches Mike drink for drink because it’s a matter of _pride_ , and because Bill has never met a challenge he won’t ridiculously over-respond to. He’s old enough to know this about himself now but not old enough to stop. 

Mike says it’s amazing because Bill’s a string-bean, which isn’t _true_ — he may not be _Mike Hanlon_ , all tall and broad, strong in a way that had lead the high school football coach to drive up to the farm several different times during junior year to try to convince Mike’s grandfather to send him to Derry High so he could play for the team — but Bill does alright, his shoulders have broadened out, he doesn’t look _small_ the way he had felt, horribly, as a child. But Mike thinks Bill doesn’t get drunk, and that isn’t true, either; Bill _feels_ it, when he drinks to keep up with Mike, feels the room spin like a fucking cliche, feels his words tripping all over themselves, and he slows down and he’s _careful_ Bill takes control of his own reactions, he doesn’t let himself act like some fucking _lightweight_ , but he still _feels_ it.

He wonders if that’s how Marion got started, too.

Georgie shakes his head like the drinking thing isn’t what he was thinking of anyway, which is _good_ because Georgie is legally an adult and Bill’s roommate in the house, now that their parents have done a preemptive snowbird and moved down to Florida, but he’s also Bill’s baby brother, and just _barely_ not a child, and Bill tries to set a good example sometimes. “It’s because neither of you are the other one’s sidekick, you both have your own reasons for working together, and you don’t let each other get away with anything.”

Bill thinks that’s a pretty generous reading of what’s probably a kind of misogynistic characterization of the franchise’s only significant female character, designed to be only independent enough to be sexy, but he’ll still take it, honestly. Mike stretches his arm out along the back of the couch behind Bill and smiles this long, slow smile, and Bill thinks, traitorously and not for the first time, that if he was going to be trapped in this town for what all of the stories the racist old people tell seem to be confirming is a twenty-seven year cycle, he’s lucky it’s Mike who’s stuck here with him.

10)

When he thinks he’s worked out everything he can just by poring over the notes in the album, Mike makes a list of names and locations and dates to look up, and makes his way to the library.

“It isn’t natural,” the librarian sniffs, “So many boys your age all shut in at the library. It’s almost summer, you should be out with your friends.”

Vaguely, Mike wonders which other boys his age she’s been chasing out of the library. There don’t seem to be many around _now_ , anyway. Mike’s grandparents try, between summer camp and piano lessons, little things here and there, to make sure that being home schooled doesn’t mean he’s completely isolated from kids his own age, but Mike has always felt a bit like social interactions depend on some kind of basic understanding he’s never quite managed to learn. He thinks maybe some other boy who spends his almost-summer weekend days getting judged by librarians for sending time at the library might be someone he’d be able to connect with.

There are a lot of things Mike could say in response to her comment, but he does still want her help, so instead he just ducks his head and smiles a little, like he’s shy. _Using those big eyes to flirt your way through life_ , Gram calls it when Mike uses the same expression to ask for another helping of desert at Christmas, but it always makes her smile back. The librarian doesn’t smile back at him, but she does lead him to the archives away from the usual parts of the library Mike is familiar with, and teach him how to use the microfiche machine, so he counts it as a success.

One thing the library does have available is a faithful record of _The Derry Register_ , every weekly issue on file from 1890 on. At first, Mike thinks this will be a lot more useful than it ends up being, but as he starts to spend some time in it, he begins to notice a pattern in the discrepancy between the reporting and the opinion pages, the letters to the editor, and anywhere else in the paper where things are up for debate. It’s like they’re always counter-balancing each other — when the articles are hysterical or seem like they’re trying to call up some outrage, the letters to the editor seem almost resigned, and when the news articles seem calm and matter-of-fact about the horrors around town, the letters and opinion-pieces sound panicked.

Mike is deep into a series of letters about the immoralities of the Bradley Gang that seem specifically designed to drum up an angry mob when he looks up and realizes it’s growing dark out. Daylight isn’t any guarantee of safety, but if Mike heads for home now, he has a much better chance of not running into any real trouble from Bowers or his goons on his way, so he starts packing up to head out.

As he’s leaving, he notices a group of boys his own age and a little one, the little one moving a little awkwardly, pelting their way down the sidewalk. They’re laughing, it’s not the run of a group that has something dangerous in pursuit, but something about the flash of the motion, after all the horrible things Mike has spent the afternoon reading about, sets him a bit on edge. After a moment, Mike realizes that the little one must be George Denbrough, the kid who lost his arm a few months ago. There’s been plenty of talk about the Denbrough boys since the attack, rumors flying, but the press coverage of the event has felt almost lackluster, and the pattern feels familiar to Mike. The town needs to be worried enough to live in a heightened sense of fear, worried enough that people might take justice into their own hands, might act out in violence, but there can never be enough organized community support to keep anybody safe. If the infrastructure of the town is ever strong enough to keep anyone out of harm’s way, it needs to be balanced by a population that doesn’t really care. These days, a little blond boy has been hurt, and is still alive every day to remind everyone about it, so the town won’t ignore it. Following the formula Mike has been feeling out through the old newspapers, this must meant that there’s no authority they’ll be able to trust when —

— _When what, Mike?_ Mike doesn’t know. When whatever’s going to happen starts to happen. Mike looks at where the pack of boys are long gone, ducked into the ice cream parlor. Mike knows one of them, a little — Eddie Kaspbrak has piano lessons with Miss Evelyn on Thursdays just after Mike’s lesson ends, and they’ve spent some time chatting in her living room as she sets things in order between their lessons. Mike could go over and say hello. _Not yet_ , whatever force sent him to the library to begin with whispers to him. _It’s not time yet._

32)

Mike has a crush on the new assistant children’s librarian. He thinks Bill doesn’t know because Mike always thinks he’s so mysterious, but Bill has known him since they were thirteen years old, and he’s not going to pretend not to see it just because — well. Just because he might _want_ to.

“You could ask her out, you know,” Bill tells him, after Georgie has fallen asleep on the love-seat and Mike and Bill are sitting each with their backs to one arm of the couch, legs tangled in the middle, listening to Bill’s dad’s old bluegrass records.

Dad had made noises about pitching the turntable and the records when he moved down to Florida, leaving Georgie and Bill more space to make the house their own, but Bill likes them, likes that they haven’t changed since he and Georgie were young enough that nothing about their town felt strange or terrible. He likes that Mike likes them, too — sometimes Mike brings over some of his grandfather’s records, too, to add to the mix, and at this point the two collections are blended together on the shelf.

Mike’s grandfather died while they were in college, and he and Mike had a difficult relationship, but Bill thinks Mike still misses him sometimes. Derry seems like the perfect place to miss people, though — except for a few streets which have swelled to try to draw in tourists on their way to more remote locations, most of the town seems to be in a state of extended decay; not different from the town they knew as children, just older and more rotten, all the bones still the same.

Mike’s new friend, the assistant children’s librarian, is an exception. Drawn by the job rather than the town, she’s from way up the coast, near Canada, from a town much smaller than Derry. Bill knows she and Mike chat at staff meetings, and he’s pretty sure he saw Mike make a pass at her at the Derry library holiday party, which he dragged Bill along to as a plus-one. And now they’re working on some kind of outreach project together that’s meant to reach school kids, and Bill has heard more about her good ideas for youth engagement tonight than he has speculation about a child-eating monster — which is maybe normal for most friendships, but not for this one, and especially not for this one over the course of the last few years since Bill and Mike decided to seriously get down to the business of clown-preparation.

“She likes you, I bet.” Bill doesn’t know, honestly, how anyone could _not_ like Mike, who is steady and kind and passionate about the things that matter, and looks like someone out of a cologne ad.

“We’re friends,” Mike says in that mild way he has where he’s spent his entire life being publicly pleasant and non-threatening as he biked his way through town making deliveries for his grandfather, and it’s really not your business what’s going on under the surface. Bill hates that look as much as he likes it — it’s useful, yes, but _Bill_ isn’t supposed to be the one on the other side of it.

“You’re friends and you like her, and maybe you should ask her out.” God knows, Mike deserves to have something in his life besides the meticulous study of a history of atrocities in preparation for an ultimate showdown with an otherworldly evil.

“Oh yeah?” Bill doesn’t know what Mike thinks he sees, to make his tone go all knowing and teasing like that. “That what you think friends are for?”

Bill suspects he is, horribly, blushing. “I’m just saying I don’t think friendship should, y’know, _preclude_ asking her out.”

“But what if I wreck it?” There’s something in Mike’s tone that’s a little more serious than any other part of this conversation — if anything, all of the earlier parts have felt like Mike is laughing at Bill, a little.

“You won’t.” Bill _knows_ Mike, has seen him angry and afraid and intent and stubborn and sad and trying-to-offer-an-out, and he knows Mike doesn’t wreck things. He takes the risks that need to be taken, and then he pulls them off. “You couldn’t.”

“I hope you’re right about that,” Mike says, and then he’s up on his knees on the couch now, looming forward through the dim blue light coming from the blank screen of the TV now that the video’s over. He starts out on the other side of the couch from Bill, and then he’s up on his knees in the center, and then he’s carefully maneuvering around Bill’s limbs to make it to Bill’s side of the couch, leaning this hand on the arm of the couch behind Bill, and then they’re kissing.

It feels like that, too — nothing and then all at once. There isn’t a moment where Mike kisses him and then, sequentially, Bill responds. Mike is looming, then he’s leaning, and then all of the sudden, instantaneously, they are kissing and it is a mutual action. Bill thinks this just means that some of him must have seen it coming, the kiss, in order to be ready for it, but it doesn’t feel like that at all. Bill lets his face be pressed back against the arm of the couch by the force of Mike’s mouth; lets his body slide down the couch and moans, fitful and involuntary, as Mike follows him down.

11)

The paraffin wax on the delicate origami paper makes for kind of an odd effect — warps the intricate patterns printed on the paper a little — but it has to be done if Georgie is going to take his boats into the bath with him, and Georgie has to take the boats into the bath with him because he says that someone is laughing at him in the tub.

It comes from the drain, Georgie says, and his therapist in Bangor says that it’s a developmentally appropriate fear, actually — usually it’s children a few years younger than Georgie that feel afraid of sewers and drains and flushing toilets, but Georgie has just faced a massive traumatic event, and a bit of emotional regression is to be expected. His parents are just lucky it’s coming in the form of this fear, rather than bed-wetting, the doctor jokes, and Bill hates him, he hates him, how dare he make a scared little boy feel ashamed or make light of any of Georgie’s reactions, not that _Bill_ believes there’s anything laughing up at Georgie from the drain but also how _dare_ this doctor not _believe_ George — this is the last time Bill’s parents bring him with them to Bangor for Georgie’s weekly appointments.

When they get home, Bill takes Georgie by the hand and walks down to the cellar with him; somehow, it doesn’t feel as important to Bill anymore, that Georgie get over his fear of the cellar. For a moment, as they make their way down the creaking steps, Bill wonders if their mother is right; if Bill is feeding off of Georgie’s fears, reinforcing them and making them bigger, because Bill could swear he hears a giggle from the depths of the cellar, half-muffled by the sound of their feet on the stairs. Bill holds Georgie’s hand tighter and grabs for the wax off of the shelf. For the blink of an eye, as he snatches the wax off the shelf, he swear he sees something crouching in the non-existent space behind the shelf, staring back.

When they make their way back up into the house, Dad asks, “What were you doing down there, Billy?” with this furrow-browed, concerned look that he’s had a lot lately. It makes sense, Bill knows — there’s a lot to be concerned _about_ , but somehow, he doesn’t like the way it seems to be directed at him, more often than not. He tries to tell himself that it’s fear _for_ him that he’s seeing in his father’s face — fear for him the same way there’s fear for Georgie, because their father worries for them and wants them to be safe — but the thought rings false. Bill thinks of the moment his father arrived at the police station, after Georgie and Mom had disappeared in the ambulance. Bill had been wearing one of the police officers’ spare t-shirts, swimming in the too-large garment but no longer soaking in Georgie’s blood, but he knew that the blood had still been there — smeared in hard-to-reach places on his face, making his hair stand on end. He’d sat there in the police station in the dry t-shirt, but still in his pajama pants and dirty, cold bare feet, not thinking about the things he’d just seen, and he’d felt a hundred years old. Then he’d looked up and met his father’s eyes, and his father had seen it.

And these days, sometimes Bill looks up to see the fear on his father’s face and thinks, _he’s afraid of me_.

Bill squeezes Georgie’s hand where he’s still holding it from coming up the stairs, and Georgie — he’s a smart kid he always knows more about what people are feeling than he lets on. It used to drive Bill crazy when they’d fight, and Georgie would spit and kick like a wild thing right up until Mom came into the room, and then he’d burst into tears, but in this moment it’s so useful, Georgie knows what Bill needs, and he looks up at their father and says, “Billy was getting the paraffin wax for me, so we can make my boats float.”

This is Bill’s solution to the problem of the laughing in the bathtub. Just before Bill had yelled at the doctors during that last appointment, the doctor had said something kind of interesting. He’d said it to their parents, and right over Georgie’s head, like Georgie was _stupid_ , like Georgie wasn’t _right there, listening_ , Like Georgie couldn’t _hear him_ , but he’d still said something maybe kind of good. He’d said that when the problem was in someone’s feelings, sometimes the solution would be in their feelings, too — sometimes if explaining logically that there was no one lurking in the drain wasn’t going to help, finding an answer that spoke to Georgie’s _feelings_ , and not to his logic would.

Having Bill fold him boats helps Georgie calm down. Filling Georgie’s room with paper boats helps Georgie feel like he hasn’t lost anything. And Bill suspects that letting Georgie take a few of those boats into the bath with him will help Georgie feel like he’s not going in unprotected, when he’s vulnerable and wet and he can’t see what might be lurking in the drain.

Bill explains this; not the doctor mind-trick part, but the part about getting Georgie armed for bath time, as they make their way up the stairs to Georgie’s bedroom. It helps, Bill thinks, remembering their father’s considering look when Georgie spoke up to explain today’s project, that building things together has always been how he and Georgie and their dad have related to each other: building camp fires and would-be tree houses and dioramas for Bill’s school projects. Except for Dad’s hobbyist skill with woodworking, they’re none of them very good at it, but they have all always liked the feeling of making something where there was nothing before. Bill thinks of their mother’s odd expression when she woke him from the foot of Georgie’s bed this morning, and he thinks both of their parents would have put a stop to the boats weeks ago if there hadn’t been something about Bill’s careful fingers and Georgie’s serious expression over the sheets of paper that had reminded them of something more innocent; more _normal_.

Georgie nods and heads to the dresser, where the smaller, more delicate origami-paper boats are stored. The bigger ones, which are largely folded from hospital scrap paper begged off the nurses, are on the floor, the posts of the bed, and any other handy surface around the room. “If we do the smaller ones, I can take more of them,” Georgie tells Bill seriously, finally letting go of his hand to choose an assortment of his favorites.

This is sensible, Bill thinks, and also a good sign that Georgie knows the boats are symbols, that he’s fighting an imagined fear with an imagined strength. Not that it’s not fair for Georgie to still be afraid — not only have the police not caught the guy — _thing_ — _guy_ who hurt him, but Bill is pretty sure they’re not even looking anymore, too distracted by the Betty Ripsom case. Still, it’s important that Georgie knows that they’re doing this so he’ll feel stronger, not so the boats will literally mount an attack on a literal danger from inside the drain, but so he won’t feel vulnerable to attack to begin with. Choosing smaller boats seems like a promise that Georgie knows why they’re doing this — he knows what’s real and what’s not, because as horrible as this whole experience has been, Bill’s little brother is going to be _okay_.

They water-seal maybe ten of the boats, in the end, and their mother sighs when Georgie takes them into the bath with him, but she doesn’t stop him. Bill salutes him on his way into the bath and says, “Fair seas for your armada, captain,” because he saw a pirate movie on TV during his last sleepover at Stanley’s house, and it feels like the right thing to say, and Georgie smiles and salutes back.

It works, Bill thinks, because Georgie comes out of the bath smiling, and he doesn’t have to get out too soon, soap still sliding off his shoulders, because he can’t stand to be in the same room as whatever he thinks is in the drain. Bill’s plan _works_.

Later that night, when Bill is taking a shower before bed, he hears that same soft, half-muffled giggle he could have sworn he heard in the cellar earlier with Georgie. _Brave Billy,_ Bill thinks he hears over the rush of the water, and he scrubs soapy hands over his ears, trying to clear out the strange, water-muffled quality of his hearing. _Coming into my realm unarmed — get it! Unarmed! Although you’re not the one who lost one, Billy_ and this, this is too much for Bill to think he hears for it to be a trick of the water, _And maybe that’s why you’re not afraid, hmmmm? Because you let your baby brother get hurt, but you’re still fine?_

“I didn’t,” Bill says, out loud, even though that’s stupid and crazy, talking to the voice coming out of the drain, the voice that can’t be _real_ , it’s crazy, but Bill can’t stop himself, he says, “I didn’t let him get hurt, I heard you on the walkie talkie and I stopped you,” but even to his own ears, he doesn’t sound sure.

 _Oh, it’ll take more than that to stop ME, Billy,_ the voice taunts. _I’m still here, and I can take him back any time. I’m just giving him a little bit of space to run before I chase him down. The fear is so much sweeter that way_.

“No,” Bill says, and even as he’s saying it, he knows it’s too loud, loud enough to be heard over the sound of the shower, maybe loud enough to be heard through the bathroom door. “ _No_ , you can’t have him.”

 _Oh, but I will_ , the voice says, hatefully pleased with itself. _I’ve already got a bit of him, see, and I’m keeping it safe for him until I get the rest_.

Bill can’t remember deciding to look down, but before he knows it, his eyes are locked on the drain, and it’s then that he sees familiar fingers — Georgie’s fingers, pale and dirty and unnaturally strong, bending the metal of the drain to push their way up and into the tub. Bill stumbles backwards, slipping against the slick surface of the bathtub, warm water still steadily beating down on his head.

 _Until then_ the voice says, as the little hand finally bends the metal of the drain enough to shove its ways all the way up into the bathtub, _I have Ed Corcran and Betty Ripsom to keep me company, don’t I, children?_

Bill skids a little further back against the slick resistance of the bathtub and goes down hard, body sliding back towards where Georgie’s small fingers are reaching for him. From the drain, Bill hears voices familiar from the halls at school, from his third grade class when he and Ed Corcran had done a book report together, calling, _Yes, Bill, we’re down here!_

 _Didn’t think of that, did you, Billy?_ the first voice says. _Didn’t think of anyone else I took, you got your brother back so the rest of them don’t MATTER, is that right, Billy?_

Bill has his legs pulled up to his chest, now, to keep them from where Georgie’s little hand is still sticking out of the drain; it’s still there no matter how many times he hides his face or looks away and then glances back, hand slowly, patiently reaching around, feeling its way towards Bill.

“No, no,” Bill didn’t mean for anyone else to get hurt — he doesn’t want _himself_ to get hurt, and he can’t just stay here, warm shower water falling on his face and mixing with the tears that started falling Bill-doesn’t-know-when. Bill has to get _out_ , so he says, “No,” and “I’m sorry,” and tries to get his feet under him, tries to stand up so he can get out of the bathtub because surely, _surely_ there must still be a world out there where this is impossible, in the room he can still see the light from through the blue of the shower curtain.

“I’m _sorry_ ,” Bill says, and he stands, and the voice says _can’t get away from ME that easy, Billy Boy_ , and Georgie’s small, cold hand closes around Bill’s ankle far tighter than Bill’s little brother is strong enough for, and Bill closes his eyes and he screams.

“Billy!” his mother shouts from outside the door. “Bill, honey, are you alright?”

Bill breathes. His hip hurts where he slipped and fell, but he can’t feel Georgie’s hand around his ankle anymore, and when he looks down, it’s gone, the metal grate on the drain unchanged as if it was never bent apart with unnatural strength. Bill turns off the water from the shower, hair still studded with soap suds, and pulls the curtain back. Like he thought, the world beyond the shower curtain is unchanged; same bath mat on the floor, same cheerful array of toothbrushes by the sink.

“Bill?” Mom’s voice is closer, just outside the door. Bill grabs for his towel and pulls it around himself.

“Fine, Mom,” he says, a little dazed, as he steps out of the tub. “Just a little nightmare.” He knows that’s wrong, it’s the wrong thing to say, but it’s what he’s been saying when he wakes up screaming, and it’s the first thing that jumps to his mind now. It feels right, too — nothing that happened to him in that bathtub makes sense in the real world, it only makes dream-sense, all of Bill’s worry and sadness surging up through the drain because it’s what Georgie is afraid of, and Bill thinks a part of him wants to feel Georgie’s fears for him so he can protect him from them.

When Bill opens the door, his mother is standing on the other side of it, a worried expression on her face. She lays a cool hand over his forehead and says, “You look a little peaky, sweetie.”

“I’m just tired, Mom.”

She nods. “Can you do me a favor, hon? Can you try to sleep in your own bed tonight? I know you’re not getting enough rest, all scrunched in next to George.”

Bill could tell her that he doesn’t think he’ll sleep at all if he can’t look over and see Georgie, safe and breathing, beside him, but he sees the way some of the tension in her shoulders relaxes when he nods, and he can’t bring himself to feel bad for the fib.

33)

It’s all fun and games until your not-boyfriend steals a sacred artifact from the local Native American tribe.

“Aw, jeez, does that mean David’s going to be pissed at me?”

David is the chief of the local tribe’s son. He’s also Georgie’s fishing buddy. Bill personally doesn’t think anything Mike has done is going to cause too much of a rift between Georgie and David — David is about as easygoing as Georgie, and doesn’t seem to take too much interest in tribal politics — but Mike apologizes anyway. “It might be a little awkward for a while there, George.”

After a moment of consideration, “That’s okay,” Georgie allows. “The season’s almost over, and he’s pretty go-with-the-flow, I bet he’ll be over it by next year.”

Georgie and David’s fishing trips never seem to produce any actual fish, so Bill isn’t sure what being in- or out-of-season has to do with anything — he’s reasonably sure that what they actually do is goof around by the river and get really excited about sleeping in a tent a couple of times a year, with the fishing rods there for protective camouflage, so he’s not sure being out-of-season is actually going to affect their plans much. It’s not Bill’s business, though; Georgie has a shockingly solid social life these days, largely full of Shokopiwah kids who live safely just outside of town and occasional passers-through who stay for a year or two because a job is a job before the weirdness of the town starts to get to them and they make a break for the border.

Bill also thinks that the impact it’s going to have on Georgie’s social life is actually the least important consequence of stealing a religious artifact from a community that already has every reason to distrust them, and which seems to have a fair amount of information about the subject they’ve decided to dedicate almost three decades of their lives to researching. Plus, Bill’s pretty sure it’s, like, _wrong_.

“Mike, Jesus,” Bill rarely — almost never — gets to or has to be the voice of reason with Mike, who is so fucking steady it’s frightening, but he guesses everyone has a point where they go off the rails and after a solid decade without any real breakthroughs not guided by Mike’s father’s notes and with their deadline closing in with about a decade to go, Bill thinks that even the steadiest person has a right to a breaking-point. This is why they’re a team, Bill thinks. Mike has held Bill steady throughout the years since college, as they’ve tried things and tried other things, and had nothing ever quite work out, and now it’s Bill’s turn to say “Give me that, we’re taking it back.”

“We are not, sit your ass down and let me tell you what I saw.”

“Of course I’ll listen to — what do you mean ‘saw’?”

“I’m putting on the kettle,” says Georgie, who is very good at being not only not in the middle, but not in the room at all on the rare occasions when Bill and Mike fight.

Mike follows Georgie out of the room with his eyes, then turns back to Bill and smiles ruefully. “Okay, so the stealing part of it was a little shady.”

Bill snorts, but the easy way Mike admits it settles something in him, and he can already feel his instinctive unease start to iron itself out. “ _A little_ shady?”

“I really think this could be our hook, though. We can’t ask them to come back unless we have a way that we all can kill It this time — a way that we’ll be better prepared than last time.”

Bill nods. The needing a plan, needing some reason that a second try at It will be different, will go _better_ than last time is something they’ve talked about a lot, and he knows it’s been weighing on Mike that all they’ve found has been stories of It running roughshod over the town. There’s no record of anyone else ever fighting back, even unsuccessfully.

“Okay,” Bill says, sitting down at the table. “Okay, I’ll listen, b-but Mike, I still think we should take the, uh,” and he looks over again at the four-sided leather basket marked out with what looks like a story, “The thing back, after.”

Mike nods and says, “First I’m going to go see if George made coffee after all, this could take a while,” and turned to follow Bill’s brother into the kitchen. As he heads in, Bill could swear he sees Mike squaring his shoulders, like he’s about to do something that he doesn’t want to do. The sight of it makes Bill nervous; how bad can it be, this thing Mike heard — saw? — at the Shokopiwah ceremony?

Then Mike comes back in with two mugs of coffee cradled against his chest and a strange, hangdog expression on his face, and he hands Bill a drink he didn’t ask for, and before too long, the world begins to tilt around Bill, and the room seems to melt away and the town grows younger around him before his eyes, and under it all, he can hear Mike’s low, clear voice narrating the horror, the resolve to fight it, the ceremony, the failure, and the way the tribe moved safely outside of town, after.

When Bill comes to, he’s lying on the floor with no memory of how he might have gotten there, but his head is in Mike’s lap, and Mike’s strong, careful hands are scratching lightly across his scalp beneath his hair. Mike drugged him, Bill can see that now. Whatever it was is clearing from his system, though, and he can feel that as well, a soft, wrung-out, empty feeling spidering its way through his bones that Bill remembers from college, on mornings where he’d go to parties and end up in a back room with a few friendly faces and a little coke, and before he knew it, he’d be back in his room early and writing frantic stories with no endings. Back then, he’d wake up surrounded by yellow legal pads covered in his own chicken-scratch writing and no memory of where he’d wanted the stories to end up going, and often, he’d end up calling Georgie, trying to catch him before he left for school, certain he was losing something, and grasping to try to get it back.

He’d been right, of course. Back then, he’d call Georgie, and he’d remember It, he’d remember that summer, he’d remember what was wrong with Derry, and he’d wonder how he could ever have forgotten — and then he’d get off the phone and fall back into the long, slow spiral of forgetting until either his next weekend trip home or the next night when something itched at him until he went and got high enough that the borders of what he could know and what he couldn’t felt more malleable.

This is better because Bill wakes up and he doesn’t have to reach blindly for what he’s forgetting. He doesn’t remember the horror of it but not the details in a way that has always scared him. Instead, he looks up into Mike’s kind, intent face with the memory of what Mike wanted to show him right there behind his eyes, and he says, “But it didn’t work for them.”

Mike nods like he’s been expecting this objection and takes Bill’s hand where it’s reaching for him, twining their fingers together. “But they’re right about what can hurt It, don’t you see? We knew it back then, things can hurt It if you believe they will, if you really believe. Remember Bev and the fence post? Remember my bolt gun? I swear, thinking back on it now, if I hadn’t told you it wasn’t loaded, it really might have shot It. If you’d believed it was loaded, we might not still be talking about this.”

“So you’re saying — they didn’t believe their own ritual?” Bill is pretty sure whatever drug it was has left his system, but he still feels a little strange and slow. “How could you possibly know that?”

“All creatures must abide by the laws of the forms which they inhabit,” Mike says — quotes, really, and as he says it, Bill can hear the echoes of the Shokopiwah chief relating the same words to Mike in the drugged-out vision Bill just had. “It’s belief that it was invulnerable must have been stronger than their belief that they could beat it. But we can be better, and part of the way we can be better is by sharing this with the others without telling them it failed. If they go into it believing it has to succeed, then it has to, right?”

“That’s not—” Bill still isn’t sure that’s right. “But the panel shows it not working,” he says, seizing on the easiest, most right-in-front-of-his-face objection.

“We can scratch that side out—“

“So why did you steal it? If it doesn’t show what we want it to show.” Bill is pretty sure he has to be sitting up for this conversation, if he’s going to make whatever point he’s groping his way towards with any authority. He lurches his head forward, trying to get his shoulders and torso to follow, but the surge upwards sends a rush of dizziness back into him, and he slumps back into Mike’s lap.

“Woah there,” Mike says, and his voice is carefully pitched to calming the way it always was as he gentled the lambs on his grandfather’s farm growing up. “You’re still coming down, your head will clear in a second, don’t try to sit up yet.”

 _Oh_ , Bill thinks with a mild detachment, _so we’re talking about this now_.

“You drugged me,” he says to Mike. He doesn’t think he’s mad about it, but it seems worth saying out loud.

“Yeah.” They’re still holding hands, Bill notes absently. It’s not something they’ve done before, really. Since Mike didn’t ask out the children’s librarian — Carol Danner, who Bill has met up with when she and Mike go for after-work drinks several times now — Mike spends as much time at the Denbrough house as he doesn’t, and they sleep together as often as they don’t, and they do the grocery shopping at seven a.m. as the store opens when one or both of them is having an insomniac episode, and they’re together more often than they’re apart but there’s being together and then there’s _being together_ and Bill looks detachedly at where Mike is still holding his hand as Mike brushes the hair off his forehead and agrees, “Yeah, it’s this root the Shokopiwah use. I needed for you to see for yourself because if I just described it to you, I might miss something.”

Bill nods, because it makes sense, and because it’s in the spirit of everything else they do, it’s like trading interview recordings of nursing home inhabitants and oral histories recorded by academics back and forth like playing cards or sprawling in bed together in the sticky midsummer heat, most of the way undressed and quietly listening to the crackle of the police scanner, lying close.

“There’s something there, you’re right,” Bill says, and he’s sure it’s true but his mind isn’t quite making the connection it’s grasping for, “But I don’t think it’s just about the believing, and I don’t think we should leap to defacing other people’s historical artifacts until we figure it out better.”

Mike laughs, and he looks — relieved? — relieved, maybe, yes, although Bill is still feeling too muzzily exhausted to say for sure, and agrees, “Yeah, okay. We’ll figure it out together.”

12)

They schedule Georgie’s therapy sessions for the same day as his PT appointments, which means that it’s pretty much a full day, and after last time left Bill spitting mad at Georgie’s therapist, Bill doesn’t get to tag along. Bill knows he’s headed home to an empty house, and while as recently as a few months ago he might have thrilled at that thought, but being in the house doesn’t feel _safe_ anymore, somehow. Bill isn’t sure if it’s just because he’s been staying in with Georgie lately, and Georgie never feels quite safe lately, or if the house, as well as the street, and the whole town, is tainted for him, since he knows, now, that horrible things can touch them.

In any case, Bill knows he’s heading home to an empty house, so he takes the long route from school and ends up walking past the second-hand shop. And that’s when he sees the bike.

Bill isn’t thinking about Richie’s dumb comment about getting Georgie a sidecar, when he sees it; he’s thinking about Georgie off in Bangor telling some would-be authoritative stranger everything that makes him feel small, and he’s thinking of his parents’ cold looks when Bill yelled at the doctor last time, and he’s thinking about the empty house he’s avoiding, and the fact that Eddie and Richie and Stan tried to get Bill to come down with them to the Barrens after school today to try to build a dam, and how part of him _wants_ to, wants to get caught up in a project that has nothing to do with Georgie being hurt, or with the missing kids, or with the body they found in the canal the other day — the body that _could_ be Eddie C. or Betty Ripsom, but also everyone thinks might not be either of them at all, might be another kid _entirely_ gone missing and then dead and decomposing and _gnawed on_ in the river.

The bike is _big_ , is the thing, too big for Bill even with those new four inches he put on in the last year and a half since he got his current bike for Christmas. There’s nothing like being twelve and also having actual dangers to outpace on a bike to really remind you that your own bike, a kids’ bike with its smaller wheels, has less power and less capacity than one that might fit you less well. Bowers and Huggins and Hockstetter are too cool to be seen building up a sweat riding a bike, and so even a small one used to be a good guarantee of outrunning them, but now Huggins has a car, and getting out of an ugly encounter has a lot more to do with being extra fast on a bike and then unexpectedly cutting down alleys or across parks or in other directions where a car can’t follow. Last week, Richie dodged them by ducking into Freese’s department store, he says, but that’s always a risky move because it counts on the fact that someone’s watching to stop them, and half the time, having an audience doesn’t make a lick of difference. In the end, Richie made his escape by faking like he ducked out the fire door and set off the alarm.

This bike looks like it could do a lot of cutting through alleys, a lot of crashing into the woods, too, if it needed to. _Looks like it could beat the devil_ , a voice in the back of Bill’s head whispers, and sure, it looks like that, too, but mostly it just looks like it could take a lot of punishment and still come out as fast as ever. It has a rack over the rear wheel, too, which is better and more secure for riding double than putting someone on the seat, which gets precarious. It’s no sidecar, but Bill thinks that, in a pinch, he could probably use a setup like that to get Georgie out of a situation, though his mind shies away from defining what “a situation” might entail. Georgie is a strong kid, he could hook his arm into Bill’s backpack and stay on pretty securely, if Bill didn’t have to keep lurching forward while standing on the pedals the whole time.

The man at the second-hand shop names a price that would clear Bill _out_ of his birthday money and what he’s saved from shoveling driveways throughout the winter — cash he’s been saving for ice cream money and movie tickets this summer. Bill _has_ a bike — it’s a little small, but if he keeps growing, he’s pretty sure he’ll get a new one for his next birthday anyway. But this one — it makes him think of Georgie’s boats, a little. It doesn’t really matter if it’s that much _better_ than the bike it has already; Bill looks at it and he thinks he could feel stronger. 

Richie is pretty good at creating a distraction if a few people need to get sneaked into the movies without tickets, and ice cream isn’t something Bill _needs_ , not like he’s suddenly convinced that he needs this bike. He asks the shop owner to hold onto it for him and races the rest of the way home to clear out the jam jar full of cash that replaced the piggy bank last year when it started to feel too babyish.

34)

A lot of the people they interview about Derry history are old — old enough to remember the events they’re talking about, or at the very least, old enough to remember people who remembered talking about them. Egbert Thoroughgood would have been one of these, if they’d gotten to him twenty years earlier — he was a name listed in Mike’s father’s notes and then underlined and circled: important. But he was ninety years old when Mike’s father was taking his notes in 1978, methodically making his way through town, somehow sure that his young son was destined to be caught up in the town’s terrible history, and by the time Mike found those notes in 1989, Egbert Thoroughgood had been dead almost a year.

And that might have been that — one of the things Sandy Ives, the historian up at UMO who Bill and Mike spend the most time with and bounce the most ideas off of, says is that the trouble with oral history is that all it takes is one generation where no one’s listening very hard and the chain is broken, the stories are lost.

Thoroughgood’s family don’t break the chain, though, which Mike finds out years and years after Thoroughgood’s death, when it should be far too late to hear any of his stories. The Thoroughgoods are the kind of canucks who may have moved a hundred miles south but still speak French around the house, and make sure their children are listening when they tell stories about the darkness that lurks in their hometown.

Claude Heroux was a logger and a lumberman back when logging was one of the pillars of industry in the state, and the Kenduskeag River running through what would grow into downtown Derry kept the area populated and prosperous. He loved Davey Hartwell well enough that when Hartwell’s union talk got enough momentum to get him killed, Heroux made it his mission to destroy everyone responsible, and he didn’t mind starting with arson and moving into axe-murdering to get it done.

There were, Mike reflected, several things about this story that felt important, and only a few of them made their way into Thoroughgood’s grandson’s telling of the tale in any kind of detail. Anton, the grandson, remembered the blood on the blade, and the way, his grandfather had said, everyone in town pretty much stepped aside and let Heroux get on with it, when he came in with his axe; no one really liked the man much, and Mike’s not sure how unambiguously Egbert Thoroughgood described Heroux’s and Hartwell’s relationship as a romantic one, but the way Anton let his tone get suggestive as he mentioned it made the implication hard to escape, which may not have helped. But, Anton Thoroughgood said, it had felt like the natural order of things — _talk shit, get hit_ , a taunting voice from Mike’s childhood called out in his memory, the first time he tried to turn to an adult for help, six years old and Henry Bowers chasing him down on his tiny bike — Heroux getting his chance at the ones who wronged him.

Tracker, Mueller and Bowie, Thoroughgood said, and probably some others, he didn’t remember, but Mike could venture a guess that anyone else there would also be big names around town — names rooms in the library were named for, names that had donated big chunks for cash to the school — these men had made the choice to drag Davey Hartwell and his union organizing supporters out to the woods to string them up by the neck until they stopped twitching, and if they were going to be careless enough to lose Heroux in the chaos, then they probably earned it when Heroux finally stopped hiding in the woods and came out to the Silver Dollar bar and started parting their limbs from their bodies over the poker table. The night it happened, Anton recounted, Heroux brought his axe into the bar with him, leaned up against the counter, then bought himself a drink, polite as anything, before he made his way over to the poker table, got down to business, and didn’t stop until he was five bodies deep.

Then, after he was done, Thoroughgood said his grandfather said, when Heroux had had his revenge, and had piled up the pieces of the bodies in a bloody pile, it was also only fair for the town to take its revenge right back, for the deputy to arrest him and then for none of the police to notice when the mob broke down the jailhouse door, broke Heroux out of jail, and lynched him from an old elm that grew out over the canal. Even Heroux seemed to agree, Thoroughgood recounted his grandfather’s words — Heroux let himself be taken, first to and then out of the jailhouse meek as a kitten, purpose fulfilled. After he heard the story, Mike searched the archives for precedent, but there were no other lynchings that took place in this part of Maine — Heroux’s guerrilla execution was a one-time event.

This was the strangeness that stood out to Thoroughgood, the grandson of one of the men who’s sat in the bar and chatted as Heroux took his revenge, and then felt the town shift in mood in the hours afterwards until he found himself standing beneath a hanging tree. For Mike, the story isn’t unprecedented in its violence, nor in its mob mentality; both the burning of the Black Spot club and the massacre of the Bradley Gang had those elements in spades, and the Kitchener Ironworks explosion had a much higher bodycount than any of those. No, what’s different about this event, in the parade of tragedies that makes its way through Derry’s history, is that it’s a horror that’s shaped by a poisoned, twisted love.

Mike talked to Anton Thoroughgood first in 1999, maybe a year after he and Bill started investigating again in earnest, and the story hasn’t left his mind in part because it’s one of the least bloodstained of the twenty-seven year punctuation marks in the town’s history. Now, with the phrase _all living things must abide by the laws of the shape they inhabit_ ringing through his head, Mike thinks of Claude Heroux’s explosion of violence at the loss of the one person he seems to have cared for in the world, and he thinks Pennywise may have played Itself when It lit the fuse on Heroux for Its periodic feast.

Georgie has come back to the house now that the threat of Bill and Mike shouting at each other is over, and Bill’s head seems to be mostly clear of the drug Mike gave him, and they’ve got a fire going in the living room of the Denbrough house to combat the muffled darkness of the snowy night outside, and Bill repeats it out loud, the words that are stuck in Mike’s head. “ _All living things must abide by the laws of the shape they inhabit_ , what does it _mean_?”

It’s like Bill lives in Mike’s head, sometimes, like they can hear each other’s thoughts. Mike thinks he likes it; he guesses it might feel boring to some people — couples are supposed to have their own hobbies, Carol from work says, but Bill writes books and Mike works in a library, and then at the end of the day they both unwind by obsessively researching gruesome local histories and looking for echoes of those histories in current and recent local crimes. Mike supposes it might feel like they’re the same person, except for the fact that they take in the same information, follow the same trains of thought, and, often, feel the same feelings, only to act on them in entirely different ways. It’s why Mike needed Bill to see what he’d seen, earlier today — their internal mechanisms are different in a way that’s both satisfying and necessary.

Georgie stokes the fire a little, poking at it until sparks fly and then saying, “It means you’d better hope It shows up looking like me again, Billy. ‘Cause this time we’ll know that any time it looks like me, it can’t hurt you, because the laws of being Georgie-shaped are that we don’t eat our brother’s face off.”

Georgie says it like a joke, but it nags at something Mike has been thinking — the laws of being Claude Heroux were that Davey Hartwell needed to be avenged, but once everyone involved in his murder had been chopped into pieces, the fire went out of Heroux, and he went first to jail and then to his death without any more attempts to fight back. And then, when he was done, the laws of the town were to turn on the outsider, the one who broke the rules. And since that outsider was just one man, and he a man with all the fight drained from him, leaving him hollow, the death toll was limited to Heroux’s victims and to himself.

“It chooses Its shape based on what we’re afraid of,” Mike muses out loud as Bill comes back into the room with hot chocolate, one for Georgie, one for himself, and one for Mike with a grin and a “Promise it’s not spiked with anything.”

Mike feels his face crease up into an answering smile, but keeps puzzling out the thought that’s on the tip of his tongue. “So It chooses Its shape based on _us_ , but then It’s limited by that shape, and that limitation is something we can use against It.”

“So, like, make it follow you through a tiny doorway and then catch it in a sack when it’s tiny and drown it like an unlucky kitten?” Georgie is the nicest kid, Mike thinks, conveniently forgetting that Georgie is only four years younger than himself and has been a legal adult for the better part of a decade, but he’s also _Bill’s_ brother, and the winner of several prestigious awards for their coauthored horror novels which have been called, both complimentarily and not, “hair-raising,” “morbid,” and “perhaps having a little bit too much fun exploring the darkest parts of the human experience.”

Bill squints down at Georgie thoughtfully and says, “Not a bad idea, but I feel like It’d see an obvious physical trap coming.” Bill settles onto the couch next to Mike, and Mike sits up and slings the arm not holding his hot chocolate around where Bill slumps beside him absently, pulls him in, and hooks his chin over the top of Bill’s head. He’s been on-edge since he stole the artifact, guilty and sad and panicky and righteous. He’s pretty sure the tribal elders won’t call the cops on him, if only because they’re even less likely than he is to get fair treatment from them — of the two of them, Bill is the one who uses his horror-writer reputation and his down-home, aw-shucks white boy smile to flirt his way into a little bit of insider info about local crime from the authorities — but using that certainty against them makes him feel slimy and strange.

“It’s shaped by us,” Mike tries again, sounding the words out on his tongue, “So the best way to control how It responds to us is to know ourselves well enough to predict what It will show Itself as? And maybe to try to influence what we’re afraid of, maybe take some of Its possible shapes off the table?”

Bill laughs, and Mike can feel it against his chest. “So you’re saying we’ll beat It by getting some really good therapy?”

“Maybe.” Mike shrugs with his eyebrows rather than his body, not wanting to jostle either of their hot chocolates. “Couldn’t hurt. It’s a start, anyway. And I guess we’d better mail back that damn artifact.”

13)

It’s only a few hours since school got out, but already, Ben Hanscom is not having a very nice summer.

Beverly Marsh smiled at him and signed his yearbook, and it should have been excellent, but also Henry Bowers is apparently not about to let the fact that Ben wouldn’t let him copy off of his final in English go, and the fact that Ben broke away before Bowers could carve his _whole_ name into Ben’s skin doesn’t feel like much of a silver lining when the blood from the letter Bowers had managed to carve is flowing fast enough to stain through his shirt.

Ben hid for a long time in the hollow entrance to the sewer, under the tree, but as he stumbles through the river he hears voices. He’s momentarily sure he hasn’t run for long enough, but these voices are lighter, younger, and, most importantly, not angry like Bowers and his gang would be. Ben thinks for a moment of the car that drove by when Henry had him up against the side of the bridge, and of the cold looks on the faces of the couple inside of it, but there’s no hiding from whoever he’s come crashing towards down the river and through the Barrens.

From the bank of the stream, he hears, “Hey! Who the fuck happened to you? Get over here, Doctor K, this kid looks like he needs to be on life-support!”

Ben knows Richie Tozier, actually — or knows of him, anyway. He’s the kid who got kicked out of sex ed for stretching the condom the teacher brought in for a demonstration across the top of an orange soda bottle and shaking it until the condom filled, expanded, then came loose from the bottle and exploded soda all over the room. Every school’s got one, a kid with a reputation like that. They’re usually friendly enough to anyone willing to play audience, but it’s also usually not worth the trouble you’ll get in, getting to know them.

He knows the others, too, vaguely — that is, he knows that they’re all Bill Denbrough’s friends, and that Bill Denbrough is the one whose brother almost died this spring. He doesn’t know what they’re doing piling a mass of sticks and rocks and other junk up across a place where the stream gets narrow, and he doesn’t care particularly — it doesn’t look like they’re going to get too far with it, anyway. All he cares about is the fact that they’re not the type to pile on with Bowers and his gang, so Ben can probably safely ignore then and make his way out the other end of the Barrens and back into town. If he’s quick, he might even get to reclaim his library books before someone else picks them up.

“I’m okay,” Ben belatedly tells Richie Tozier, who’s still staring at him like he’s the next act in a variety show, and Richie is waiting for him to start to perform.

“Um, _no_ , you’re _not_ ,” another voice says — the small kid in the polo shirt, whose voice gets higher and higher pitched as he asks Ben, “Do you have an _open wound_ in the _creek_? Have you ever heard of a blood infection or—or—or _gangrene_? Do you know how close this place is to the _sewers_?”

The words are worried but the tone is furious, and Ben holds up his hands — an _I’m unarmed_ gesture — and says, “I didn’t have time to think, I was running from Bowers, and then I hid, and when they were finally gone this was the only place I could think of.”

“We know what that’s like,” Bill Denbrough says, and there’s some kind of finality in his tone, like now that he’s said it, that’s the group’s last word on the subject. “You said Bowers was following you?”

There’s some urgency in the question, because of course he doesn’t want Ben bringing Bowers and company chasing after him or his friends. Ben is pretty sure he lost Bowers when he was hiding in the mouth of the pipe, but now that he’s being asked, he wouldn’t want to swear to it. “Yeah,” he agrees shakily, and tries to explain, but Denbrough cuts him off.

“Then I guess we’d better g-g-get out of here. We have bikes, and mine is pretty big, would you be okay riding double?”

Ben has never actually ridden double before, and hesitates before replying, but Denbrough misinterprets his silence. “I know we need to get you p-p-p-patched up, that looks - that looks bad, but it’ll be better when we’re far from here — and where you won’t get creek water in it again afterwards.”

“Yeah,” Ben nods, like agreeing twice will make up for his hesitation. “I can ride double.” He thinks he can, anyway. He’ll figure it out.

35)

Social media really has been great for quietly monitoring the lives and well-being of friends who have been forced by magic to forget who you are, but who you will need to call upon again at the return of a great evil. Richie had a MySpace for years, and didn’t stop using it to halfheartedly promote his parody band until more than half of the user base jumped ship. Bev was an early Facebook adopter, and a publicity intern at Ben’s architecture firm occasionally catches him the the background of candid shots posted to the firm’s Twitter. Google alerts are great for news stories, and Mike has subscriptions to local newspapers in the towns where they all live, just in case he needs to look for obituaries.

“That’s so morbid!” Georgie crowed delightedly when Mike finally admitted to himself that he was spending enough nights at the Denbrough brothers’ house that it probably made the most sense to transfer his subscriptions so they came there instead. “Do you really think any of them are going to die before they come back here?”

Mike has to admit, with the almost uncanny success that seems to surround everyone who left town, it does seem unlikely that any of them is due for an unexpected and fatal accident. Still, “We’d better hope not, right?”

Because that’s what they’re staking everything on — the last twenty years of their lives, many of which could have taken place _not in Derry_ , if they’d felt like that was a responsible option for them to take, and the next seven, which they’re in deep enough to feel committed to. Mike still dreams about Florida sometimes — he has a postcard from the time Bill went, driving his parents’ moving truck down, just after college, and the sky looks so blue it can hardly be real, and the water below just as Crayola-bright. On the back, Bill had written _coming home to you soon_ , oddly romantic for the fact that it had been years before they ever kissed, and Bill had admitted later that by then he’d been far enough from Derry to have forgotten all about the horror of it, that he’d only been thinking vaguely of missing his friend Mike as he’d sent it — his friend Mike whose face was growing oddly fuzzy in his memory already. Mike thinks it might be nice, some day, for both of them to get to come home to somewhere a bit less blood-stained.

Over the breakfast table, Mike shoots a look at Georgie and his laptop, and it’s not like Mike has any _authority_ over Georgie, who is both an actual adult and the one who officially lives in this house, but Georgie has done a certain amount of volunteering for duty. Mike asks him, “Have you done the rounds yet?” and Georgie sighs.

“Eddie’s not going to get a fucking Facebook,” Georgie whines like the teenager he hasn’t been in years, but he starts typing surnames into the search bar anyway, without Mike having to ask.

The nice thing about Eddie’s name is that “Kaspbrak” isn’t a common one — “Marsh” is much more common, and before Bev’s company started to take off, keeping an eye on her was tricky. But Eddie — the biggest problem with Eddie is that he seems to be extremely resistant to the modern tendency to live out one’s life in public online. Mike can practically hear Eddie’s cracking teenage voice lecturing them all about keeping a neat cyber-footprint, because not doing that is how you get your identity stolen and your bank account cleared out, and, probably, eventually, your location hacked and your organs harvested and sold on the black market.

Georgie sighs. “Still no, there’s just a Myra Kaspbrak — shit! Wait, Mike, get over here, is this Eddie?”

“Did you find him?” Eddie never got a MySpace, never made the local paper, never got improbably famous as a stand-up comedian, and this means that Mike hasn’t seen one of his oldest friends’ faces since Eddie moved out of town when he was sixteen years old. Mike shoves his chair back, almost stumbling away from the table to loop around and come up behind Georgie.

“I don’t know, that’s why I’m asking!” Georgie yelps, and Mike rests a hand on the back of Georgie’s chair and sags, because it _is_ , he’s pretty sure that _is_ Eddie Kaspbrak, there in the tux beside the woman in a wedding dress whose Facebook profile they’re looking at, because, “Eddie got _married_ ,” Mike exclaims.

“Don’t sound so excited for him,” Georgie ribs gently, and Mike notes, absently, that he did sound a little crestfallen as he said it. He pushes himself up off the back of Georgie’s chair and walks heavily back to his own side of the breakfast table.

“It’s just strange, you know,” he says, and he feels almost as if he’s just gotten some new information about the clown — like he’s puzzling out his own feelings as he’s talking about them. “Seeing them all grow up like this, from a distance, and start lives, and they think those lives are the real thing, and they don’t know — they don’t know that the real thing…” Mike doesn’t even want to finish that thought.

“They don’t know that the real thing is what’s waiting for us in the sewers?” Georgie asks steadily, eyes fixed on Mike’s face. He’s always been such a brave kid, for as long as Mike has known him. Mike nods.

“But the rest is real, too, Mike,” Georgie presses on, eyes as earnest as Bill’s when he’s building up to a speech. “My friends in town are real, you and Bill — you’re real together. And Eddie and his new wife are real, this is their real life. Just because the other thing is more awful, that doesn’t make it more _real_.”

“That’s not — I don’t mean that exactly,” Mike protests, although now that he’s heard Georgie say it out loud, he isn’t sure it wasn’t part of his initial reaction. “I hate that we don’t get to be there with them,” he says, and it’s true, even if it’s also a deflection from what he started with.

“Yeah,” Georgie agrees, and there’s a massive sigh that comes after it. “That part of it sucks. But Mike, in some ways I’ve been living on stolen time on loan from It since I was eight years old.”

“You’re not—” and this is why, Mike knows, Bill was so hesitant when Georgie said he wanted to stay in Derry with them instead of going away to college. Not just because staying in Derry means staying within Its radius, but because it means letting Georgie’s life feel defined, feel bounded by It. “Your life is yours, George, and you can still use it to let it take you wherever you want to go.”

Georgie shakes his head impatiently. “That’s not what I mean and also I’m definitely not going to leave, Billy will for sure get himself hurt if I don’t make him take care of himself. But Mike. If I’m living on stolen time, and since we don’t actually know if anything we do the next time will work, the stuff we do on purpose in the meantime, that’s got to count, right? That’s got to be just as real as the damn clown. _It_ doesn’t get to be more real than the things I choose.”

Mike thinks nothing about this conversation is especially cheerful or uplifting, but Georgie’s determination has a kind of grim contagiousness to it. Georgie thinks that Mike and his brother are _real together_ , and Mike thinks so, too, or hopes so. He guesses they won’t know for sure until and unless they live through whatever’s coming in seven years and get the chance to make a life on the other side.

14)

Richie’s got a secret.

Richie’s got a secret and Beverly Marsh knows it because he’s said it aloud to exactly one person exactly one time, because a mouth like Richie’s can’t keep quiet about just about anything forever — the best Richie can do about the toxic sludge that has to spew from his vocal cords sometimes is to try to be as careful as he can about who’s listening when he finally releases it. Beverly is a good choice, Richie stands by it, because she’s not Bill or Stanley or _Eddie_ , so it doesn’t really _matter_ if she looks at him different after he says it, and she’s not a gossip like Gretta Keane and the other girls in school — Richie’s pretty sure she’s always listening, but that’s just survival at Derry High, and she doesn’t pass stories on, which is the important thing, but also, she’s as much of a loser as he and his friends are, and so probably no one would believe her even if she did start telling tales.

Richie’s got a secret and he told it to Bev Marsh under the bleachers last year when they both skipped the school assembly and she let him bum a cigarette and he coughed all the way through it and she laughed at him and he told her to shut up because he was very smooth, and she told him it didn’t matter how smooth he was because she still wasn’t going let him kiss her, she didn’t care what he’d heard she did with Henry Bowers, and he told her that it didn’t matter if she didn’t want to kiss him because he didn’t want to kiss her either, not because she wasn’t a cool girl, but just because he thought he might be. You know. Queer.

And she’d nodded and blown a smoke ring, and then she’d stubbed out her cigarette and grabbed him by the arm and dragged him out to the faculty parking lot to teach him how to round-the-world with her new light-up yo-yo.

And after that no one yelled any more specific abuse at him than usual in the halls at school, and once or twice Richie and Beverly Marsh skipped Bio lab to smoke, and they weren’t really friends but they weren’t really not-friends either, and it was all fine and normal except for when Richie was around his friends because Beverly _knew_ about him, and his friends _couldn’t_ , so when Stan or Bill or Eddie ( _Eddie_ ) was around, Richie couldn’t look at her, and then the next semester they weren’t in any classes together, and then _Georgie_ happened, and by the time Beverly Marsh shows up in the mouth of the alleyway where Richie is keeping an eye on the new kid to make sure he doesn’t bleed out while the others raid the pharmacy for supplies, he hasn’t talked to her for almost a year.

 _It’s a good thing_ , Richie thinks, _that Georgie’s off at physical therapy today._. The new kid is bleeding like a stuck pig, and Eddie is _handling_ it as only Eddie Kaspbrak can, but he’s also on the edge of hyperventilating, and Richie thinks it’s lucky Bill’s got his Big Bill hat on today. Richie doesn’t blame Bill for being shaken — for being _afraid_ more often now, after Georgie, and especially when Georgie is around and could maybe get hurt again, but today is a handy day to have their fearless leader back, and from the look on her face, Richie thinks Beverly Marsh must agree.

He locks eyes on her, but she doesn’t seem to be paying any attention to him at all, eyes skipping back and forth between the new kid and Bill — she and the new kid have some kind of quiet little code Richie doesn’t quite understand, and that’s fine and normal, Richie’s glad, he guesses, that she seems to have actual friends, since he couldn’t be actual friends with her after she knew too much about him. The Bill thing makes less sense to him — she keeps cutting her eyes sideways to him, and when Bill invites her to the quarry with them, she seems a little flustered, and Richie doesn’t understand that at all, getting all in a tizzy over Bill when Eddie is right there, being all intent and focused over the new kid’s wounds, so serious Richie wants to pinch his fucking apple-cheeks or maybe vomit.

So Beverly leaves and Richie says something stupid about Beverly and Bowers even though he doesn’t even think it’s true — Beverly’s cooler than anyone in this rinky-dink town, cool enough that when Richie grows up and gets out, he wouldn’t be surprised to run into her again in New York or L.A. or somewhere else that’s big and cool and interesting enough to see that Richie is charming and funny and Beverly is pretty and interesting and cooler than anyone else in Derry. Beverly is cool and Bowers is a creep — everyone knows Bowers is a creep — so Richie is pretty sure Beverly wouldn’t have touched him with a ten foot pole, but Beverly Marsh _knows about Richie_ , and even if she doesn’t seem to care, having her around Richie’s friends feels like a stupid risk.

It isn’t up to Richie, though, and when she shows up again the next day, stripping down to her underwear and taking a flying leap off the cliff like she’s never heard of fear, he can’t bring himself to be bothered by her presence. She doesn’t seem to have told anyone what he told her, and she’s never brought it up again, but more than that, there she goes being the coolest person in Derry again, she’s got more cool in her most casual, offhand moments than Richie has ever had at any point in his entire life. He may not _want_ her the way he can see that Ben and Bill do, the way that’s even hiding a little bit under Stan’s unruffled face, or the blushing sideways looks he thinks he sees Eddie dart her way, but he can see the appeal. She’s like Eddie, honestly — so blindingly, unapologetically herself that it feels like she shouldn’t even be trying to be anything else.

They run into the Irish cop as they’re headed away from the quarry and up to Ben’s house — Richie doesn’t know the Irish cop’s name, just his accent. He could make a name up — he probably will, when he tries to mythologize the moment by telling the story again later, and it’ll be horrible and stereotypical — Seamus Delaney, maybe, or Argus O’Flannery — and Stanley will roll his eyes and Eddie will shove Richie, but he’ll know they’re both snickering a little underneath and it will be _great_ — but in the moment, when the Irish cop catches them biking up from the quarry on the way to Ben’s house to see his murder-town research, Richie tries to focus on not saying anything at all to the cop, because authority figures tend not to understand Richie’s sense of humor.

“Now, I know you kids weren’t playing down at the quarry,” the cop says in that horrible, knowing way that says he means exactly the reverse and wants to see if he can get them to admit it.

“N-n-no, sir,” Bill says, pushing his way out in front. If Richie tends to rub adults the wrong way — to make teachers look to him first when someone throws a spitball, make Eddie’s mom eye him suspiciously when no one else is quick enough with a lie about where they’re off to after school — Bill is the opposite. Something about his face is just naturally politer, even before he opens his mouth, and when he does speak, adults tend to believe him. Richie thinks it’s the stutter, like there’s some correlation between how hard Bill works to get the words out and how true they must be. Richie hopes Bev and Ben get the message — Bill is their designated adult-liaison. Things just tend to go better that way.

“Because the water’s not safe and neither is the jump in,” the cop goes on. “I just know smart boys and — and girl,” and he does a double-take when he sees Bev with them “know better than to take a risk like that.”

“Yes, sir,” Beverly says, like she hasn’t gotten Richie’s psychic message.

“Especially when the world’s dangerous enough without asking for trouble,” the Irish cop concludes, and Richie bites down on his lip so hard it throbs to avoid saying _You mean with the child-eating monster on the loose_ , because even if just thinking about it makes a nervous fear-giggle bubble up into his throat, he also knows it’s the worst possible moment to make the worst possible joke.

Richie’s not the only one who doesn’t say anything to that, and into the silence, after a moment, the cop goes on, “Now, if I didn’t know better, I’d have thought you all were swimming in the quarry because of your wet hair.”

 _Don’t break ranks_ Richie thinks — to Eddie who thinks the quarry water is disgusting and clearly wants to shower for eight years at the reminder that it’s still all over him; to Stanley who didn’t want to jump in the quarry to begin with because they’d all break their necks; to Ben and Bev who, as strangely comfortable and natural as today has felt, are still somewhat unknown quantities. After a breath, Ben steps forward and says “It’s just sweat, sir.”

For a second, they all just stand there, taking in the perfect, disgusting, stupidity of that statement. What is the cop going to do, contradict them? Then Bill steps a little way forward again and says, “Y-y-yeah. Just suh-super sweaty.”

“How about this heat, right?” Bev agrees, fanning her face with her hand. Eddie pulls a face and says, “And Richie dumped my water bottle on me,” gesturing with the neat little water bottle he’s been carrying around since the weather got above seventy to avoid dehydration, always prepared like he was the Boy Scout and not Stanley, who rolls his eyes at Eddie just like this is an actual, normal tussle between Richie and Eddie, and not an imaginary one to use to distract law enforcement, and agrees.

That just leaves Richie, so he un-bites his lip, and isn’t surprised to hear himself say, “That’s just because you’ve got to loosen up a little, Eddie Spaghetti. It’s _summer_.”

“As long as you’re staying out of the quarry,” the cop says indulgently, and Richie’s pretty sure he knows they’re lying, but they’re lying well enough that catching them out at it isn’t his job anymore. Then he says, “But if you kids are going to play out in the woods here, I want you to promise me you’ll only come down here together — only in a group, mind, just like you are now, swear to me.”

And Richie doesn’t say, doesn’t say, doesn’t say _We promise not to get our arms eaten off_ , he just puts on a Pop-eye accent and says, “Aye-aye, sailor,” which maybe isn’t great but is better than what he could have said so Eddie really ought to get his elbow out of where it’s now digging into Richie’s side in retaliation as he says to the cop, “He promises! I promise, too.”

“We all promise,” says Bill, and Richie is doubly glad to have only said the second-worst thing he could have said out loud. Bev and Ben and Stanley all promise, too, and the cop lets them go with just a warning look that says the quarry wasn’t actually what he was worried about to begin with. And then they follow Ben home to his aunt’s place, and Ben tells them all about how the town they live in is probably going to get them all killed, but it’s fine because they’ll be in good company; someone is always dying in Derry, apparently.

36)

Despite being mostly heterosexual, Georgie Denbrough is much more likely to be found at the Falcon, the gay bar on the edge of town near the bus depot, than either Bill or Mike. This is because Georgie likes to dance, and also because Georgie is one of those people who likes to pick the handful of people he likes and cares about, and completely disregard any opinions about him or perceptions about him that come from anyone else.

This is also because Bill does _not_ like to dance, and also does not like to share anything that may or may not be true about his personal life with the town of Derry and _also_ doesn’t especially like to think about whether his quiet, years-long relationship with Mike makes him gay or not. It is _also_ because Mike has been, emotionally, about fifty-six years old since he was seventeen, and he would always prefer a night in with Bill and a series of wild and not-so-wild conspiracy theories to a night on the town. Mike and Bill have a police scanner and a Blockbuster membership that eventually is replaced by a Netflix account, they don’t need a bar.

It’s at the Falcon that Georgie meets Adrian Mellon.

Adrian thinks there’s something kind of romantic about Derry — it’s got its cheesy modern touches, sure, but it’s also got this land-that-time-forgot aura, and it still gets Adrian writing again like he’s fresh out of college and _inspired_. It’s also the place where he fell in love, which he knows is a pretty personal charm, but it means something to him. Still, after he gets to be friends with Georgie Denbrough, he starts to see some of what Don means about the feeling of darkness hanging over the town.

Georgie is, for one half of an infamous horror-writing duo known for their ability to scare readers silly, really kind of a lovely person. He’s cheerful and friendly, and he and Adrian get to be close kind of alarmingly quickly — Adrian had close friends in college, and he’s got one of the best friends he ever had in Don, but it’s been years since he felt this zing of connection with a purely platonic friend. It’s almost like falling in love all over again.

Georgie has lived in Derry his entire life, and seems to have no plans to move anywhere else any time soon. Adrian thinks this should just deepen his weird affinity for Derry, but what it actually does is give Georgie’s warnings about the town a bit more weight than Don’s. Don is nothing if not trustworthy, steady in a way Adrian never thought he’d want in a partner but now can’t imagine going without, but it’s true that he tends to see things fairly glass-half-empty, so when it was just him warning Adrian to be a little bit extra careful about Derry, Adrian had found himself — not dismissing it, but definitely not taking it quite as seriously.

But Georgie, who knows the town like the back of his hand, also gets all furrow-browed and concerned when Adrain talks about how at home he feels, here in Derry. “Bad things happen here,” Georgie says, and then he gives Adrian an abbreviated version of the Mike Hanlon history of the town.

They’re in a booth on the far end of the room from the bar, in a quiet corner that matches Georgie’s serious face, and Adrian tries to take it seriously, he does, but he can’t help but feel like the whole story has the air of a well-told ghost story, and he says so. Georgie’s face pinches up, and he says, “Yeah, it’s a little like that, but all the bad things actually happen.”

“Can’t find a town in America where someone hasn’t been murdered in horrible ways, George,” Adrian tells him. Georgie has a little bit of an innocence to him, and if he’s lived in this town his whole life, it’s almost sweet for him to think that the awfulness is centered here, but in Adrian’s experience, bigger cities have both more allies and more threats at the same time. There’s always a trade-off.

Georgie shakes his head and says, “Not like this. The worst things people can do to each other, they do in Derry. Mike’s grandfather isn’t from here, and he was here when The Black Spot burned. He always said this town takes the way people already hate, and it makes it worse.”

Adrian shakes his head, but it’s not in denial, it’s to try to straighten out his thoughts. If Georgie really believes all this — “So why do you stay? If it’s toxic like that.”

Georgie shrugs on one side, the side where his arm is missing, and says, “To fight it. It tried to get me once, I guess I feel like I can’t walk away after that.”

Adrain thinks about that a minute, because when Georgie says it, it sounds like a more specific goal than just trying to bring some positivity to a backwards, backwoods town. Georgie goes on, “Adrian, can you promise me something weird?”

That sounds like it could be the beginning of something sketchy, actually, and Adrian is not totally sure if he’s on-board, but Georgie has been a good friend so far, so he figures he owes it to him to at least hear him out, so he says, “I mean, probably.”

“Just — take things that seem threatening seriously, because shit can escalate around here in ways that you’re not ready for. And if you — Adrian if you think you hear or see a clown, can you promise me you’ll run? Just run, don’t think about it, don’t look back. Promise?”

It’s not a sketchy request, then, it’s just, as Georgie promised, a very weird one. Adrian could almost laugh at it, but Georgie looks so serious that he just says, “Yeah, I promise,” and then tries not to think about it again.

15)

When Bev wakes up in the morning and puts it off, puts it off, but finally has to walk into the bathroom, the blood is still there. It’s smeared a bit, where her dad would have used the handles to turn on and off the sink, to flush the toilet, footprints in the blood on the floor where it was disturbed, so clearly he both still couldn’t see it, but _could_ interact with it. _Is it just me?_ the thought flits. _Am I the only person in the world who can see it?_

Sometimes, the apartment can feel infinite, like it’s the only place in the world where people exist, like even if she can hear their neighbors cooking, talking, and listening to the radio through the walls, there’s nothing beyond the bounds of their apartment but empty space; no one to notice, no one to intervene, just Bevvie and her dad, slowly circling each other as the tension builds, and god only knows what will be left after it breaks.

It isn’t true, though, even if it feels like it. Bev has been spending time with Bill and his little gang of lost boys, and even now, inside the apartment that can feel so impermeable, she can picture the way Eddie’s nose would wrinkle in disgust over the blood, the excruciating jokes Richie would try to make about periods, the quiet, concerned frown that would overtake Ben’s whole serious little forehead, and suddenly, more than anything, Bev wants to know if they can see the blood, too. Her dad couldn’t, but if there are two kinds of people, in the world, in Derry, in this apartment, Bev feels sure that the boys she’s been biking down to the quarry with aren’t like her dad, they’re like _her_.

In one sense, Beverly has known most of them for most of her life, but in another very real sense, she’s only known them in any kind of significant way for a few weeks, so there’s no reason why she should feel so sure of this. Once she thinks it, though, it’s the only thing she can think, and when it occurs to her that she’s got no more rational reason to think they’ll believe her than anyone else, she reasons that it isn’t like she has a whole host of other options, anyway. She calls Bill and she says she has something to show him, something important, and he tells her he’ll call the others, but they’ll probably get there sooner than he will, because he and Georgie will be walking.

Bev has only met Bill’s little brother briefly, but she doesn’t think a room full of blood is something she really ought to be presenting to a kid who’s just been — who’s been hurt like that. “I’m not going without him,” Bill says, defensive and a little combative and, well, she’s not going to _fight_ him. 

“My dad is out now, but he _can’t_ come home to find that I have boys in the apartment,” Bev doesn’t — she doesn’t want to think about what would happen, if he did. 

“Call the other guys, have one of them wait outside as a l-l-l— as a l-lookout,” Bill says with all of the self-assurance of a boy who doesn’t quite let himself be aware that he’s the leader of the pack of his friends, but who’s used to giving orders just the same.

Beverly doesn’t know if she knows the others well enough to call them all over, but Bill is already reading out their phone numbers, and telling her that Stanley only lives a few blocks away from her, and should reach her the soonest, and once she taken down their numbers, she figures she’ll feel silly if Bill shows up with Georgie in tow and she hasn’t called anyone else, so she calls Stanley and says she needs help with something, calls Ben and doesn’t even get through an explanation before he says he’s on his way, calls Eddie and Richie and tells them both that they’re all gathering at her apartment today before they head down to the Barrens, and just like that, she’s got six boys headed towards her house, drawn to her like magnets. She settles down on the front stoop to wait.

Bill is right, Stan arrives first, but the others are close behind him, and as Bev shows them the spot in the alley behind the building where they can store their bikes, she explains about how her dad can’t come home to find boys with her in the apartment — not what the consequences would be, but just the impossibility of it. He _can’t_ , and at least Stan’s serious face seems to understand how important this is. He delegates Richie as the lookout because apparently that’s what they always do, and Bev shares a look with Ben, the two outsiders of this tight-knit little crew.

“What am I supposed to do if her dad does show up,” Richie whines at Stan, not quite looking at Bev, and she thinks it’s about what he told her last year, still — at this rate she might actually have to talk to him, tell him she’s not going to give him away.

“What you always do,” Stan tells him, sardonic. “Start talking,” but as they make their way up the back stairs, leaving Richie looking gangly-small and forlorn among the mass of bikes, Stan tells her, “He’s actually pretty good about it — he can usually keep whoever it is distracted and also do something loud enough to warn the rest of us to scram,” which is as reassuring as it is intriguing — Bev remembers Stan and Eddie and Bill in the drug store they day they patched up Ben, down their regular class clown and struggling to come up with their own distraction plan for Mr. Keene.

Eddie whistles, when he sees all the blood, and Ben asks questions, but it’s Stanley who goes straight for the cleaning products under the sink, with an unerring instinct for the orderly way in which a home should be organized. And a home should not have a blood-soaked bathroom, no matter who can or cannot see that it, or how that blood came to be there, so as Bev explains what happened, Stan starts methodically soaping up and wiping down every exposed surface, turning the water in the cleaning bucket pinker and pinker by degrees. Bev joins him in cleaning up, and it feels almost like she needed someone else to start for her, to make something so strange start to feel like a fixable problem. Ben and Eddie aren’t far behind, and by the time Bev hears a knock at the door signaling that Bill and Georgie have arrived, the bathroom is half-clean, and not looking nearly as grim as it did when she called this morning.

After Stan and Eddie and Ben could all see it, Bev isn’t surprised that Bill and his little brother, whose face is solemn as he carefully shakes her hand in greeting, can see it as well. What she is surprised by is the way Georgie looks around at the room and said, “It was at night, right? I keep telling Billy the clown only comes out while it’s dark.”

After a pause where Bev takes that in, lets it rattle around in her brain, and finally allows herself to answer with the most basic truth, rather than with any of her million questions, she says “It was at night, yeah.” She meets Bill Denbrough’s eyes and sees a shudder work its way through his whole body, feels an answering shiver go down her own spine. “My father couldn’t see it,” she explains to him, suddenly apologetic in a way that she didn’t feel before, with the others. She thinks Bill’s hands are shaking. “I needed to know if it was just me, but all of you can see it, too?” She’s sure of it, but it’s so strange she still lets her voice quirk up into a question at the end, hungry for confirmation. She looks around the room as all of the boys nod in response. “It happened last night — first there was a voice and then — then after that the blood, it came—”

“It came from the drain,” Bill finishes for her, the first words he’s spoken since he came into the apartment. He’s still standing in the hall just outside the bathroom, a hand on Georgie’s shoulder to keep him from coming any closer. “Hey George, why don’t you go wait downstairs with Richie while we help Beverly clean up?”

“Why?”

Bev has never had a little brother, and has always sort of assumed that, as a general rule, little siblings were boss-able, but this fluffy blonde muppet nearly two feet shorter than Bill looks up at him with absolute steel in his eyes, and Bev has a feeling this kid doesn’t generally let himself get sent away or tucked out of sight. Bill gestures to the blood on the wall and tries one of those magnetic, Bill Denbrough smiles that Bev has seen him use to get his friends out of trouble with teachers any number of times, and says, “Do you really want to help with _cleaning_ Georgie?”

Georgie narrows his eyes like he knows he’s being managed, and Bev watches the brothers slide into what looks like a staring contest, before Eddie Kaspbrak breaks in with his rapid-fire little voice to say, “Beverly’s dad can’t know we were here, Georgie, and Richie is keeping watch, but if Bev’s dad comes home, Richie can either distract him _or_ warn us, it’s pretty hard to do both.”

Georgie cuts his eyes back to Eddie, who looks dead serious and not at all like he’s humoring a child, and then over to Stanley, who nods as well, and then right back to Bill. Then the kid sighs like they’re the squabbling children and he’s the long-suffering adult, and agrees, “Okay, I’ll go, but I’m _telling_ you, Bill, the clown only comes out when it’s _dark_ , you don’t have to _worry_ right now.”

When Georgie goes back downstairs, little footsteps fading down the hall, Bev assumes that they’ll talk about it; about what happened in the bathroom, about whatever Georgie was talking about with a clown, about how Bill knew that the blood came from out of the drain. Instead, it’s like the earlier conversation has chastened all of them, and they finish cleaning in silence.

They rinse out the cleaning rags, of course, but even after thoroughly cleaning them out, they’re still stained brownish with blood, and Stanley notices Bev’s wince as she stores them back under the sink, and she notices him noticing and laughs a little. “It’s not like it matters — if Dad couldn’t see the bathroom there’s no reason he should be able to see the stains.”

“But you’ll know,” Stan finishes for her. Then he says, “I’ll come back tomorrow or in a few days and we’ll take them down to the laundromat. But let’s just—”

Beverly can see what he means, doing anything more about this right now feels close and claustrophobic, and she would very much like to stop smelling blood, so she nods and agrees, “Let’s get out of here for now.”

Richie is only too happy to get a move-on — in the time they’ve been cleaning, he’s taken a chunk of rock and used it to draw a hopscotch board on the sidewalk for Georgie, and as they make their way down the stairs to the front of the building, they can hear him offering dramatic sports-commentary as Georgie hops through the squares. “We’ve never _seen_ a match like this before, folks! Young George Washington the Second does a _twirling hop_ over _three squares_ , but _OH_ he doesn’t quite stick the landing, that was a _fumble_ , the Russian judge gives two and a half stars, better luck next time, my young buck!”

It’s not — it’s not _subtle_ , and Bev spares a moment to be grateful that her father hasn’t come home to see it going on on the front stoop, but she can see how it would provide a distraction if he _did_.

When Georgie sees them coming he hops out of the faintly-scratched-out hopscotch square, ready to go, and Richie calls “ _FOUL_ ,” before turning towards them with this hopeful little smile, asking, “Quarry now? It’s hot as _balls_ , my shirt’s already soaked through anyway.”

“Maybe if you didn’t go around in like eight layers that all look like you robbed your dad’s closet for them, numbnuts,” Eddie calls down to him, shoving his way through from the back of the group straight out to the front. “You look flushed, do you think you have heat-stroke? How many fingers am I holding up, Georgie does he seem stupider than usual?”

Georgie shakes his head, grinning, and says, “Only as stupid as normal.”

While this plays out, the rest of them gather their bikes. Beverly takes hers as well, even though they’ll be walking them on the way to the quarry, since Bill and Georgie are walking — she’ll want to ride back at the end of the day, anyway.

Richie is the only one who gets up onto his bicycle, riding up the street and then back to them, turning fitful circles around them, like all of the energy under his skin has to be exorcised or he’ll explode. Out under the sky, in the moving air, away from the smell and sight of blood, it’s like they can talk about it again — first they tell Richie about Bev’s bathroom, and then she has to ask Georgie what he meant about a clown, because she didn’t see one, no, but something about his certainty that his nightmare clown and the thing in her drain are the same thing feels right, feels true.

“It was laughing like it was a clown,” she says, testing out the association on her tongue. Bev didn’t see a clown, but she felt the same baffled unease on her own face that she saw on Bill’s when he walked up to her bathroom and paused outside, hand clenched hard around his little brother’s shoulder. “Giggly, but not like anything was funny, just like he wanted me to hear him laughing.”

To her surprise, it’s Eddie who nods at her description, says, “Yeah. That’s how — that’s how the clown laughs, too.” Bev cuts her eyes back towards Bill, because what _is_ this, some kind of conspiracy where they’ve all known about this _clown_ thing, like Bev has finally been inducted into the awfulness? But Bill is staring at Eddie blankly, and after a moment, he asks, “You saw it, too?”

Most of them, it is starting to seem, have seen It, or something like It — something _not right_ , something that doesn’t make any sense, a threat they don’t understand — but then there’s a bike abandoned by the side of the road, and Belch Huggins’ car pulled over beside it, a sure sign of one of the normal wrongnesses of everyday Derry. And Bev isn’t sure she’s got enough pull within this little group yet that she has the right to plunge them all into a fight, but when she called, they came, and she can’t stand the thought of any other horrible things being allowed to happen today. She’s seen the homeschooled kid, Mike, around town, and he’s always polite and soft-spoken in a way that Bev has never managed to be, but keeping his head down isn’t keeping Mike out of trouble now, and defiance doesn’t keep Bev safe, either, so maybe there’s no winning. Maybe there’s just dumping your bike on the side of the road and plunging down the ravine into the woods, grabbing a rock as you go. Maybe there isn’t just keeping your head down and eyes forward or standing up alone, maybe there’s trusting a troop of boys to follow you into battle the same way they followed your dive into the quarry — maybe there’s strength in numbers. And if Bev Marsh, who has always been alone, one half of a quietly-pitched battle with her father since the day her mother died, can have strength in numbers on her side, then maybe she can share that strength with someone else.

From across the creek, Beverly can see the homeschooled boy she doesn’t really know — Mike — being held down, face thrust into the dirt and four against one bearing down on him, and in the moment, she doesn’t weigh her options or think about whether it’s a safe choice. Instead, she drawn back her arm and throws, and her rock meets its target exactly.

37)

Adrian tells Don about what Georgie said, of course. It still sounds like a series of tall tales, and probably some signs of unexamined trauma in Adrian’s new friend, but Don just gets serious and quiet about it, and when a group of townies start shooting them dark looks through the dusk at the Canal Day festival, Don reaches for his arm and says, “Let’s go now.”

Adrian doesn’t like to let himself get driven out of anywhere, but Don says, “You said you promised you’d take this shit seriously,” and it’s true, Adrian did. He shoots those assholes a look right back, and he heads for the edge of the crowd with his head held high, but he lets Don have his way, and makes his way back towards the car.

They’re in a crowd, so there’s no real way to hear whether footsteps are following them, but it feels like there are, anyway, and when Adrian chances a look behind him, he’s right.

It’s just because Georgie said it, though, Adrian swears — it’s like not thinking of pink elephants, as soon as Georgie said to run if he saw a clown, the idea was in Adrian’s head, and when he turned to look behind him, those guys were following, but because he was _expecting it_ , he saw it like one of them was done up in clown makeup. Still, when it’s happening, he doesn’t hesitate — he grabs Don’s hand and books it to the car. And when they make it home, he calls Georgie.

Once he’s dialed the number, some of the absurdity of the evening sets in. Those guys could have been dangerous — in the real world. But the thing that makes a chill go up his spine is the fact that he maybe imagined seeing a clown?

He only realizes he’s been breathing quietly down the phone line when Georgie repeats, “Hello? Adrian?”

“I did what you said,” Adrian tells him, because this feels like the important thing. “I saw the clown and I ran.”

“You saw it?” Even during that odd conversation at the bar last week, Adrian doesn’t think he’s ever heard his new friend sound so serious, or so intent.

“Yeah, I — there were four of them, and then I looked back and there were still four of them but they were _different_ , one of them looked like—” he forced a choked-out laugh. “It’s because you told me to look for clowns, there’s no _way_ one of them had a — had a fucking clown face, but it wasn’t just _them_. They were following us and I looked behind us and everyone else in the crowd, they just looked — they looked so blank. Like the entire town was going to watch and not stop them at whatever — whatever they were going to do.”

Georgie lets out a heavy sigh. “Yeah. They would have, probably. I’m really glad you’re okay, Adrian.”

Adrian is glad, too. He feels strange, and embarrassed for feeling so shaken — he’s had worse near misses in New York, honestly, but something about this one feels like it was just a few breaths away from something much worse. He says to Georgie, “Don’s right, isn’t he? We should think about moving out of town.”

“I — yeah.” Georgie agrees. “I don’t know what happened next, but if you saw the — if It saw you, it’s not just going to let you go.”

Adrian could ask for clarification, now, he thinks, but then he’d have to hear it, and maybe he’d rather not know.

A few miles away, Georgie Denbrough sets down his phone and turns to his big brother. “It’s back,” he says. “It’s definitely back, I think it’s time to call them.”


	3. three.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it has been a very very very long day and it is not even 3pm, I am posting another chapter today because _fuck it_.

16)

On the way over to Bev’s, Georgie walks along the curb like it’s a tightrope. He’s got his arm held out perpendicular to his body, and Bill wonders absently if it actually helps his balance, or if it’s just habit. He’s getting fitted for a prosthetic next week, and he seems a little jittery about it, one day excited for a robot hand, the next telling Bill solemnly on their way up to bed for the night, “The clown says I don’t need it.”

It had been the first time Georgie had talked about the clown since Bill waterproofed his boats for him, and Bill had jolted at that, had said, “I thought the clown didn’t come to see you anymore.”

Georgie had shaken his head, looked up at Bill, and said, “The boats keep him from coming too close, but he’s still there, he still talks to me, he just can’t reach me.”

On the way to Bev’s, out in the brightness of the day, Georgie doesn’t bring up the clown again, and dances away when Bill tries to ask. “He doesn’t come out in daylight,” Georgie shrieks, giggling, racing down along the lip of the storm drain, and Bill would argue that they don’t _know_ that, but he thinks that if he does, if he agrees, once and for all, that they’ve both seen the clown, both heard it speak, and that it exists outside of both of their fear, that they’ll allow it to exist somewhere outside of the strangeness of whatever happened in the bathroom, that odd evening in the shower and during Georgie’s baths — weird moments that seem impossible as soon as they’re over, moments that only happen when each of them are alone so that there’s no outside confirmation of their truth.

Then they get to Bev’s place, and even when the bathroom is half-cleaned, it’s very clear that there was blood literally all over it. Bill thinks not even actual murder could spread that much blood that far, and of course _that_ is when Georgie mentions the clown again, and of course he is right.

From there, everything feels blurry. Bill somehow convinces Georgie to wait outside with Richie, not because he really thinks it’s safer there — Georgie was outside when _It_ got him the first time, and Bill doesn’t like the way his mind is framing it like that, _the first time_ , like there’s going to be a next time, there’ll be a next time over Bill’s _dead body_ , and it’s an expression, yes, but also, but also _yeah_ , anything that could do that to Georgie’s arm could absolutely make Bill a dead body — but because he can’t, _can’t_ see Georgie surrounded by this much blood again, it makes his thoughts feel swollen and hot and too big for his head.

He also can’t leave Beverly and the others to deal with the blood without him. She’s their _friend_ , she’s one of _Bill’s_ in the same undefinable way that Eddie has been since Kindergarten, that Georgie has been since he was born, that Richie and Stan have been since they were in grade school. So he can’t have Georgie in the room with the blood, and he can’t leave Bev alone with the blood, and he doesn’t _want_ to be away from Georgie when whatever is going on is going on, but he _can_ as long as he knows Georgie is with Richie, so that is what he does.

They clean up and they don’t talk about it and they leave Beverly’s house and they don’t talk about it, and they make their way down the sidewalk and try to start to talk about it, out in the air and the sun, away from bathrooms or sucking, swirling storm drains, but Derry gets in the way. It’s nothing new, the Bowers gang beating on some kid, someone outnumbered, and Bill usually tries to pick his battles, at least a little, but Beverly is one of his now, so when she goes charging into the ravine, the most Bill can do is ask Georgie to stay out of sight before he’s charging after her, hearing the others close at his heels.

Bill doesn’t know Mike Hanlon, not really, but he knows _of_ him. Derry is white enough that Mike and his family stand out, and since Mike is their age, in elementary school he sometimes used to join their class to music programs, gym class, and other special events with a handful of other homeschooled kids in the area. Bill likes him, in a vague way that he likes a lot of people in town who are more likely to be picked on than to pick on anyone else, but he’s not sure they’ve ever had a conversation until they’re picking their way through an open field in a thin, ragged line of children. They’re all single file except for Georgie who is right at Bill’s side, almost vibrating with excitement for having thrown a rock in the fight, despite Bill’s asking him to stay out of sight.

Mike worries about Bowers coming after all of them, now that they’ve stood up for him, and Bill looks back at Mike quick enough to catch him casting big, worried eyes in Georgie’s direction. It settles something in Bill’s chest, to see someone else watchful over Georgie’s safety, even if it’s this boy who, for most intents and purposes, Bill has effectively just met. From behind them, Eddie dismisses the fear. “Bowers? He’s always after us.”

And it’s true — Bowers isn’t the reason why this summer feels more dangerous than any other time in their lives, but for some reason, no one really mentions the other threat, the new one, until they’ve made their way into town. It’s an illusion of safety, the park — Bill knows that not from _It_ , from the way It took the shower, a place where he’d always been safe, and made it dangerous, but from an entire lifetime of growing up in Derry. Being in the sunshine, in public, is no guarantee of safety. Still, the park is better for not getting snuck up on than the Barrens, and Bill is pretty sure they won’t catch Bowers out in town again today, not bruised from their thrown rocks and humiliated by his gang’s running off without him.

At first, Bill thinks they’re waiting to talk about the clown until Mike goes — they didn’t want him to get clobbered, so they stepped in, but that’s no reason why he has to get sucked into any of the rest of the danger — but he stays with them through the old train yards, back into town through the outskirts, and then all the way to the park at the center of town, and when he’s still there when they sit in a circle, and he’s still there when Georgie fixes Bill with a look that he’s had coming since before Mike’s almost-murder distracted them, and says, “You didn’t say the clown went for you, too, Billy.”

 _You let mom and dad think I’m crazy for thinking it’s a clown_ isn’t something Georgie _says_ , but Bill hears it anyway, and suddenly it doesn’t matter if Mike is still there and Bill barely knows him at all, and it doesn’t matter that Beverly is pretty and tough and Bill doesn’t actually want to ruin anything good about her image of him by whining about having waking nightmares in the shower; what matters is Georgie, and the fact that when he was scared he called out for Bill on the walkie talkie and Bill heard him and _found him_ , and he doesn’t want to think of what might have happened if Georgie hadn’t called for him. Bill looks his little brother right straight in his serious little eyes and says, “Yeah, I’m sorry. I was scared.”

Georgie stares back for a moment before nodding his head and agreeing, “It’s pretty scary.”

It’s a quiet moment — Bill feels like everyone else in the park is muted, like they’re behind glass, and only this little circle of people — his best friends, his baby brother, and a beat-to-hell kid his own age who he’s never had a real conversation with — matter. But when Bill looks up, Mike is looking at Georgie, and his eyes are serious when he says, “You’ve been seeing a clown?”

Turns out, Mike is as much of a treasure trove of information about the generations of seamy underbelly their town apparently has as Ben is. Mike talks about the weird frequency of both massacres and clown-sightings in town, and Bill has heard of the Kitchener Ironworks explosion, the slaughter of the Bradley gang, the arson at the Black Spot club, but it takes Mike laying them out in a row before Bill can feel them as a pattern. There was, he offers hesitantly, a rumor of a circus coming through town, around the time of the ironworks explosion. A series of unpleasant whispers that tried to blame the explosion of carnies, fly-by-nights, blow-through-towns, nobody from _here_. Bill thinks of the woodcut Ben showed them all last week, as old as the town itself, and with a smiling, familiar clown-face peeking out from behind a barrier.

None of it, as Stan points out, makes _sense_ , but Ben’s research, Mike’s father’s album full of notes makes it feel real just the same — nightmarish, but not the kind of nightmare that melts away when you turn on the lights. They’re sitting there in the sunlight, and something’s still coming. Bill has been jumpy and on-edge about it for weeks, and he thinks that in this moment where he’s more sure that they’re still in danger than he has been since he hauled a bleeding Georgie back from the storm drain, he should feel the most afraid he has yet. Instead, though, he looks up at his friends — his oldest, best friends, yes, but also his new ones: Ben with his research and Bev with her ferocity and now Mike, Mike with his steady determination and his book of history — and he thinks it’s actually possible that, when whatever it is hits, they might be ready for it.

38)

When Bev Marsh meets Kay McCall, it’s like a revelation. Sparks fly. Fireworks go off. They are friends, good ones, and Bev hasn’t had a close friend since — since —

Bev’s high school experience was fine. There was a certain amount of adjustment that came with moving in with Aunt Martha, but it was mostly the good kind of adjustment. Martha treated Beverly like an adult, and asked her to pull her weight around the house as she might _with_ an adult, but understood that responsibility like that had to come a measure of trust. 

Bev and Martha were fond of each other, though they don’t stay in too close of touch, and there are still a few girls from high school that Bev will grab a coffee with if she’s in Portland for the holidays at the same time that they are, but it’s not until Bev and Kay meet, hit it off, and proceed to get along like a house on fire that it really occurs to Beverly how bereft of close friendships most of her life has been.

That can’t be quite right, though — when she and Kay work side by side in companionable silence, or laugh their way through to last call at the bar down the street from Bev’s apartment for the third night running, it doesn’t feel like a _new_ thing, the giddy warmth Bev can feel settling in her chest. It feels familiar, like something clicking into place, like something she’s gone for far too long without. It must have been before Portland, before high school, Bev thinks, the last time she had a friendship like this. She mostly doesn’t try to think about that time in her life; it feels strange and slippery when she tries, and the therapist she saw briefly in college says that’s a common trauma response. Now that Bev’s record has been sealed since she turned 18, she’s had no real reason to try to make her way through those murky waters. The memory of those long ago friends feels important, though, so after a lunch break walking by the river with Kay, Bev tries. She tries to remember Derry, and any time she was happy within it, shoves past the memory of her father and out the front door, and yes, she was out of the house a lot as a child, often for no better reason than that being out of the house was better than being in it, but there were times when Bev left the house because she had somewhere to _go_.

(A thread of a memory: _“I thought you wanted to get out of here, too.” “I want to run to something, not away.”_ )

For a moment, Beverly could swear she can feel it all in her head, taking up space: the dappled light of the sun filtering down through the trees into the barrens; her arms around a boy’s waist, riding double on the back of his bike; a hole in the ground — a clubhouse — somewhere safe; the reassuring heaviness of a rock in her hand, and the surety that it would go wherever she aimed it; a bright, bright light and someone screaming from somewhere far below her; pain, fear, and a trust she had never felt before or since; faces she has only seen in her dreams at night when she dreams of death. And then she blinks, and it’s gone.

Beverly meets Tom a few months later, and he feels familiar, too, but not for the same reason.

When Bill Denbrough calls Bev on the phone, twenty-seven years after he rode his bike out to the bus station to see her off as she left town to go live with her aunt in Portland, she doesn’t recognize his voice at first. When he says he’s Bill from Derry, something cloudy and dark moves through the back of her mind and she gasps, body responding before her conscious thoughts can catch up. She thinks it’s _Derry_ , though, the darkness. Not _Bill_. _Bill_ feels like bright sun on summer-lightened hair and hot, sweaty-breathless bike rides. _Bill_ feels like all of the nagging at the edge of her memories as she worked beside Kay in companionable silence or laughed herself sick at Kay’s cheerful irreverence at the bar after. Bev tries to make it sound like her thoughts aren’t so scattered, like she has actual memories of him instead of his confused impressions, and she says, “Bill, it’s so good to hear your voice.”

She says it to try to paper over her lack of memory of him, but as she says it she knows it’s true. He laughs, and that feels familiar all over again, the same rush of unremembered associations but warmer this time. “It’s so good to hear yours, too, you don’t even _know_ , Beverly.”

There’s something heavy underneath his words, and Beverly knows in a bright, arching flash that Tom can’t know that she’s having this conversation, can’t know about the warmth in her gut that bloomed when Bill said his name and has only grown since. Tom thinks you can only feel that kind of emotional intensity for one person — that it is only _right_ to do so — and has always had only the most grudging of acceptance for Beverly’s friendships because of it. Bill is neither a woman nor a business contact, and Beverly knows instinctively that she will not be able to justify her intensity of feeling for him in a way that Tom will accept.

“You need to come home,” Bill tells her. She cannot yet recall his face, but she knows in the place deep inside of her that has sometimes pushed her in the unjustifiably right direction — to the right school to make the exact right fashion connections, to the right early risks to take with her company, to the exact day to take an impulse trip home to Portland to spend with her aunt on the day before her aunt died unexpectedly of a heart attack three years ago — that she trusts Bill and that she is right to trust him. “ _It_ ’s back,” Bill says like she will know exactly what that means, and while she doesn’t remember it yet, she knows in her bones exactly how serious his words are.

Tom, she decides, will just have to not notice as she sneaks out of the house.

It doesn’t quite work out that way, but Beverly makes it out the door and down to the airport in the end.

17) 

Ben wants to meet at the Barrens after lunch; he has something to show them all, he says. Mike is kind of surprised to be included, since, when he asks if he should bring his father’s notes, Ben stammers that, no, the thing he wants to show them isn’t about _that_ , about the clown, or the history of violence in town, or the creeping horror they’ve pretty much all admitted to feeling, even Stanley with his doubts. Even Richie who has clearly seen something he isn’t talking about.

Mike isn’t surprised to be included in discussions about what to do about the probably-growing danger because he’s clearly already in it, but he is surprised by Ben’s tripping over his own tongue trying to invite Mike to hang out with them just for fun. He’s even more surprised when Bill calls a few minutes after Ben, to ask if Mike wants to meet up earlier than that and then bike over to the Barrens together.

“Georgie’s getting fitted for his prosthetic today,” Bill says, and, “I didn’t want to ask to see your book when he was there, Mom says I’m hurting his progress by reinforcing his fears, but I want to know what it says.”

So this invitation _is_ about the clown. Mike doesn’t mind. It’s nice to be included in the things that aren’t awful with this new group, but from what he’s seen of Bill Denbrough, he’s a pretty single-minded guy, and he’s scared out of his mind for his little brother.

“I would,” Mike tells him, a little regretfully, “But I’ve got some farm chores to finish up if I’m going to head down to the Barrens later.”

Bill doesn’t even pause for a second, just offers, “I could come help? Then you’ll be done sooner, and we can talk while we work.”

Mike smiles, a little, at the thought of lanky Bill Denbrough who looks like the hardest work he’s ever done in his life is pedaling that over-sized bike of his down the street, helping out with Mike’s chores, but he’s also curiously warmed by the offer. Besides, he thinks, it’s hardly like Bill’s help is going to slow him _down_ , even if it doesn’t make the work go by much faster.

“I’ve got a friend coming by in a few minutes, he’s going to hang out while I do my chores and then we’re going to take our bikes out,” Mike announces to his grandmother a few minutes later. She blinks in surprise, which is reasonable, since Mike has never brought a friend back to the farm before, and has rarely had anyone he would describe as a friend to begin with. After a breath, she smiles and asks if his friend will be staying for lunch.

Mike’s grandfather, when he makes his way out of the barn after a long morning of mechanical repairs, is somewhat less welcoming — he catches sight of Bill lugging an armful of equipment down to meet Mike and assumes that he’s stealing or making trouble, and he won’t believe that Bill is Mike’s friend until he follows Bill down into the field to meet Mike and check with him. Even when Mike confirms that, yes, Bill is here at his invitation, his grandfather doesn’t seem impressed.

Over lunch, Mike’s grandfather quizzes Bill about how he knows Mike (“From around town, sir,”), how he does in school (honor roll three out of the last four semesters, but he’d had some trouble with Geometry), and whether his parents know where he is right now (no, but they’re out of town for the day for his brother’s physical therapy appointment, and they trust him to look after himself for the afternoon). When lunch is over and they can finally leave the table, Mike gestures Bill back towards his bedroom so he can show Bill the album before they head out.

“Your gramps is a h-hardass, huh?” Bill asks softly after Mike has closed the bedroom door.

Mike shrugs. It might be true, but he doesn’t have much to compare it to. His grandmother is definitely a little more lenient about some things, but she’s stricter about others — less worried about grades and chores, more worried about curfew and piano practice. It’s fine, they’re both fine, and neither of them make him feel like the hunted look on Eddie’s face when they stayed a little too late at the quarry the other day.

Mike goes to his bed, pulls out the album from underneath. Mike has started keeping it there because, in recent weeks, when his grandfather has seen him with the book, his face has started to go tight and tense, and then he’ll usually come up with a chore for Mike to do out in the barn so he has to set the book aside.

As Bill flips through the pages with careful fingers, Mike clears his throat and says, “He did, uh. He did a lot of it when he was a kid, like when he was our age, but then he started up again just after I was born.”

Bill pauses on one of the more scattered, association-map-looking pages, the one with Mike’s name on it, which Bill obviously notices, tracing with his finger. “Do you think he — I mean, you were a baby, why would he—?”

“There’s, uh.” This is the thing Mike has figured out in the last few days in his dad’s notes, the thing he hadn’t talked about in the park. “There’s a pattern. These things, they happen every—”

“—Every twenty-seven years,” Bill finishes for him. “Right? That’s what Ben thinks.”

There’s relief in it, Mike thinks. When it was just him, even with his father’s memory whispering over his shoulder, it had felt a little too wild, like he must have been making things up. The ghosts from the Black Spot, and from the fire that killed his parents, they had felt too real to be hallucinations but too strange to be anything else, and he’d felt caught between the two assumptions. But hearing what Bill and his brother hadn’t only seen, but had also been touched by, wounded by, and hearing that Ben and his carefully collated library research had come to some of the same conclusions made him feel, at the very least, more comfortable trusting his own perceptions.

“Yeah,” Mike agrees, “Every twenty-seven years. I think, after I was born, he did the math and he realized I’d be growing up right in the middle of the next one. I think he wanted me to be ready.”

Bill turns the page and sees that it’s blank, that flurry of research and wild speculation and worry for _Mike_ the last thing his dad had written in it before his death. “So why do you think he didn’t move?” Bill asks. “If he kne-knew what was coming, why—?”

“Why did they stay?” Mike has thought a lot about this. “I think, I think maybe he couldn’t go. My grandfather was at the Black Spot, you know, and he moved back into town after the war ended anyway — he’d not _from_ here, and when he was stationed here _that_ happened, but he said the town never left his mind, and when he and Gran got married he moved them _back_ here — like something was pulling on him, you know? And then — a lot of the notes in here, they’re from when Dad was a kid, and that’s not because this stuff was happening then. He was young _right_ between cycles, this town was as quiet as it ever gets, but the history — he was so _interested_ in it. And for what? I don’t think — I don’t think something let my family leave.”

Bill has been staring at him through this speech, which is longer than any that Mike usually makes — it’s rare that someone in his life asks him to put his thoughts into words at that kind of length, and he feels a little self-conscious about it. But after a second, Bill nods. He says, “I kind of, I kind of keep wondering, after what happened to Georgie, and even if — even if they don’t think it’s anything more than some dangerous creep, _that_ happened to Georgie, and all these kids keep on going missing, and I keep wondering why my parents don’t even talk about moving.”

He’s right, and Mike thinks of the hours he’s spent leaning over the microfiche in the library, reading pages on pages of letters to the editor from generations of Derry citizens who were concerned but not concerned _enough_ to get away from the objectively horrific waves of violence.

“I asked,” Bill says, hesitantly. “Mom got this kind of weird look and said this was h-h-home.”

It is home, Mike can feel himself both knowing what Bill’s mother must have meant and at the same time recoiling from it. It seems so impossible that she’d keep her children in this place that’s out for their blood if she didn’t have to, but later that day, when Bill and Mike bike down to the Barrens and then climb down into the club house that Ben built for them, Mike feels like he’s slotted into place somewhere that he belongs.

39)

There’s something familiar about the voice on the other end of the phone line, but Stanley can’t put his finger on it. In the other room, Patty is still talking about vacation destinations, her tone all long and languid in the way that it gets near the end of the school year when the one thing that will unknot the tense muscles in her neck and back is _distance_ , being _away_ from all those school kids she loves so much. She goes through cycles in the school year, where by the end of the semester she needs a break so badly she can taste it, but by the end of the summer, she’s itching to get back again.

On the phone, someone says, “It’s Bill,” and Stan tries to think whether Bill is the wallet-name of any of his bird-forum buddies, but something in the back of his mind whispers that the association is something older.

While he’s thinking about it, Stan hears Bill-on-the-phone scuffling with another man, another voice in the background chiming, “You did the _last_ one, Billy, it’s my turn!” Stan braces for a weird prank call when the second voice steadies closer to the receiver and says more clearly, “Stanley? It’s Georgie, Bill’s little brother. You used to babysit me, remember? We’ve got Mike here, too.”

Stan didn’t babysit in college — not like Patty, who had a solid string of regular clients and would occasionally invite Stan over to watch TV late at night after the kids were in bed. Stan never really met any of those kids, though, and while he gets a flash of a serious little child-face, the memory feels older than that, feels like — “Georgie from — from Derry?”

Georgie laughs. “That’s right. Never left.”

Stanley doesn’t remember much about his hometown, but the memories he does have all feel clammy and unpleasant, and there is a reason he never went back. Georgie says, “Listen, Bill was going to be all cryptic, and I think Mike’s doom-and-gloom would just freak you out, but Stanley, we need your help.”

Unbidden, Stanley remembers sitting beside the serious child from the last memory, guiding a clumsy left hand around a pencil and saying, _See? Being a lefty’s not so bad. Just like Babe Ruth._

The memory is a soft one, but there’s menace lurking around the edges of it, and not just because _where the hell did this child’s other hand go?_ but because something about every memory of Derry he’s ever managed to have has been suffused with something dark, because, “It’s back, isn’t it?”

He barely knows what he means even as he says it, but Georgie obviously knows exactly what he means, and sighs. “Yeah.”

And Stan has almost forgotten that Georgie, who he can almost remember now, said that there was a third person there, but then the third voice cuts in, “Yeah, but Stanley, we have a plan.”

“Mike?” Stan asks, half a guess based on what Georgie said, half almost-memory.

“Yeah, man.” Mystery Mike’s voice is low and calm, and he says, “It’s so good to hear your voice. But I need you to know, we have a plan for It, and it needs all of us. It’s like — remember what you did that time in the garage?”

Stanley doesn’t, not yet, and _It needs all of us_ hits him like a spike through his veins, but while he’s taking that in, the phone gets passed again, and that first voice, _Bill_ , says, “I know this is a lot. Are you okay, man?”

Stan could almost laugh at that, but the sound that comes out instead is choked and awful. Is he _okay_? Nothing about the memories that have started to drift through his mind like snow have ever been okay. “No.”

“Okay, do you — do you have anyone there with you?” Bill used to stutter, a little, Stanley remembers.

“Yeah, my, uh. My wife, Patricia.”

Bill’s voice isn’t soothing like Mike’s, but there’s something authoritative in it, and when he asks, “Can you put Patricia on the phone with me?” Stan isn’t even absently surprised to find himself doing so.

18)

No one handles themselves especially well when the clown explodes out of the projector, Stanley thinks. Sure, it wasn’t his finest hour, but he doesn’t shriek and clutch at Eddie like Richie does, and he keeps his head enough that when it becomes clear that Bill won’t be moving from where he’s fixed in place between Georgie and the — the _thing_ to turn off the projector, he’s able to fling himself across the space and tug the plug from the socket.

It doesn’t help, though, and the fact that it doesn’t help — the fact that the clown just keeps coming _out_ of a machine that should be lifeless and dead without its power source, it enrages Stanley. It’s worse than the painting stepping out of her frame and following him like her cold, dead eyes have always followed him around his father’s office. It’s worse than Bill talking about how Georgie was hurt in ways that can’t be _real_ except that the damage is right in front of them, it’s worse than anything that’s happened yet because it _isn’t following the rules_. When you unplug the projector, the picture is supposed to go with it, but this one _won’t_ , and Bill, their Bill who always takes the first step when something needs to be done, he’s hanging back by Georgie, which Stanley understands, but it means that no one is stepping up against this _wrongness_.

The clown is laughing like It’s — like It’s _enjoying_ the fact that it shouldn’t exist, like it’s smug about it, and suddenly, Stan is furious. He steps forward, and instead of the clown, behind his eyes he’s seeing charts from his Boy Scout handbook, he’s thinking about potato batteries and the energy generated by bike pedals, and he advances on the clown shouting, “Electric power is supplied through a steady stream of electrons! And when you unplug from the outlet, that supply of electrons is interrupted!”

To his surprise, he thinks he sees the clown flicker, a little.

“An electric current must be carried through an electric conductor! Not empty air!” The clown is fully looking at Stanley, now, and at the corner of his eye, he thinks he can see Mike moving in a way that feels like it might be less panicked and more purposeful — like he might have a plan. Stanley screams at the clown, “You can’t be here, it doesn’t make _sense_!” and Mike pulls at the door of Bill’s garage, sending it rolling all the way up, bathing the room in sunlight. 

In the sudden light, the clown flickers again. Georgie shouts, “You can’t come out in daylight!” and Mike says, “Projections don’t show up in the light,” and the clown flickers out and vanishes.

40)

Ben Hanscom has barely thought about Derry since he moved out of town at fifteen, but when he sees a phone-number he doesn’t know flashing across his phone screen with a Maine area code, the first thing he thinks is _Bev_. He doesn’t think it like the signature in his wallet that he knows must have come from someone he knew when he lived in Derry, he thinks it like a fourteen-year-old boy whose one-true-secret-love has moved to Portland at the end of the summer, and he’s waiting by the phone for a call from a 207 area code so he can hear her voice again.

He hangs up the conference call with as much politeness as he can muster when he can hardly hear the words he’s saying over the blood pumping in his ears, and then he picks up the phone. He doesn’t speak, because you can’t speak to ghosts, but he gives whatever’s on the other end the chance to prove that it’s not one, and whatever’s on the other end comes through.

“Ben?” Mike Hanlon says, and as Ben remembers, he thinks it probably would be very nice to hear from Mike, if it weren’t for, well, everything else he’s just remembered. He listens to Mike, and he listens to Bill and Georgie bicker in the background, and Mike laugh at them, explaining to Ben that the process of calling everyone home has all three of them on-edge.

Ben thinks he can see the three of them sitting together, clustered around the phone, in his head, although there’s no reason this should be true, since he hasn’t seen any of them in nearly thirty years, and, in the time in between, has almost entirely forgotten even what they looked like back then. Still, Ben looks out the wall of windows in his office and thinks that there’s something almost cozy about the imagined image of the three of them clustered around the table together.

Ben listens absently to what Mike has to say, but it’s mostly out of politeness, rather than a need for the information. As soon as Mike’s voice triggered his memory of _It_ , Ben knew what this call was all about. With the rest of his focus, he navigates the browser of his laptop to a flight comparison website.

“I know we can’t expect you to just drop everything,” Mike is saying, small and tinny in Ben’s ear, but if you could—”

“I’ve got a flight here that will get me to Portland by noon, will that work?” Ben asks.

19)

Georgie wants to go after the thing. “We know where It lives, we can _get_ It,” he says. Beverly has only really known Bill very well for a few weeks, but she can tell without a doubt from the look on his face that Bill is about the dig in and not move.

 _You’re too young,_ Bill will think, but will not say, and Georgie will know that he’s thinking it anyway, and will fight back against it, even as Bill shares other, rationalized reasons for why Georgie should not run head first into the den of the thing that tried to eat him last time. Sure enough, Georgie glares up at his big brother and says, “It ate my _arm_ , Billy.” For all that Georgie has been fairly terrorized for all of the weeks this summer that Beverly has been getting to know him, she thinks this is the closest he’s been to tears where she could see.

Bill scrunches his brows together as he thinks it through, then says, “It came when I was showing you all the map — we know where It is, but It knows we know.”

“It also came for us here,” Mike offers, voice low enough that it’s hard to tell whether he’s lost any of his usual calm. “It knew where we were enough to come for us, it’s not like staying away from It will keep us safe, either.”

“Yeah, b-b-but if It knows we’re c-c-c-coming,” Bill says, “If It’s going to be r-ready for _us_ , we should be ready for _It_.”

It may be a rationalization he’s making to throw Georgie off the scent, but it makes sense just the same. Bev speaks up. “Let’s meet out at the club house tomorrow, then.” The Barrens may be inside the town limits, but except for the glimpse Mike saw through the trees by the creek when the Bowers gang were attacking him, none of them have seen the clown when they’re out there, and that makes the space feel safer than anywhere in town. “Everyone bring something we can use as a weapon, we’ll practice a little.”

As she pedals home, Beverly reflects that not a single one of them considered telling an adult, an authority figure, the _police_. It’s not a surprise — they’ve talked about the way so many adults in town always seem to look away when even the normal, everyday terrors of their lives are going on, and it’s not like they don’t know how it _sounds_ , too. _A killer clown ate Georgie’s arm_ hadn’t gone over too well when the police had showed up at the hospital to take his statement, and they were hardly going to believe it any better _without_ the bleeding, terrified proof before their eyes.

As she’s helping out with dinner that night, Bev casts her eyes around the kitchen, looking for anything she can bring tomorrow for a weapon. Girls like her don’t get BB Guns or slingshots for Christmas, but she does have the water pistol the kid next door left under the porch and a bottle of bleach. She also has a few kitchen knives that look like they could do some damage, although she’s not sure if it’s any safer to carry an open blade into the lair of a fear-monster, which feels like asking for it to get turned against her or her friends. She tucks the two likeliest-looking knives into her backpack before bed and hopes the boys are having better luck.

She gets her wish, at least slightly — Richie shows up with a slingshot he says he never uses because his aim is shit, but he’s happy to hand off to anyone who can use it better. Mike brings a bolt-gun from the farm, which looks real and deadly enough to actually feel reassuring. And Georgie brings an armada of paper boats.

Bill has a look on his face that says that Georgie will be coming with them to the house on Niebolt street over Bill’s dead body, which is fair enough, but Bev’s still curious. She asks, “What are the boats for, George?” and when he answers, “When I bring them in the bath, the clown can’t touch me,” she can’t quite bring herself to dismiss it.

Stanley has a pocket knife from his Boy Scout camping trips that’s small enough that it probably won’t do much about the monster, but when Richie points this out, he shakes his head and says, “I know — stakes are for vampires. But I thought I could carve a few into stakes anyway? Just in case? There’s not a lot of precedent in literature for murderous magic clowns.”

Richie nods with an odd, thoughtful look on his face, and Stan turns around abruptly to go back into the woods to look for branches to carve into stakes. He looks almost embarrassed, like it really hurt him to suggest something as _illogical_ as a weapon against vampires, like he can’t quite look him in the eye. “Shouldn’t someone go with him?” Beverly asks. “Just because we don’t know if It—”

Ben nods, “I’ll go,” and follows Stanley into the woods.

Everyone gets a turn to try out the slingshot, but Bev is by far the best at it, and Richie, who is trying out a sports-announcer voice today, makes sure the entire empty clearing knows it. It is, for a day centered around preparation to fight the worst thing any of them have ever encountered, over the course of a lifetime of bigger and smaller bullies, a pretty good day.

41)

After Ben, they’ve all had a turn to call, and while it’s awful, Bill thinks, calling them all back to face something dangerous, something that could hurt them, something that _will_ shake up or even destroy the safe little lives they’ve built for themselves, there’s also a weird kind of excitement in the air. Yes, it had been frightening to hear Stanley’s voice go strange and shaky, and _yes_ , even knowing it was coming, it hurts a bit to hear these, their oldest friends, not remember them again and again. But it’s been so many years of just the three of them, stuck in this town and preparing for this day, feeding off of each other’s energy, that to have the time actually come when they’re supposed to put that research and planning and worry to the test is kind of exciting, too. It feels a little bit like what Bill thinks graduation was supposed to feel like.

It feels different when Eddie crashes his car.

To be fair to Eddie, Bill is pretty sure they’re being _incredibly_ annoying, and also they’re giving Eddie what’s possibly the worst news of his life, but they’ve finally got it together to turn on speakerphone so they’re not literally fighting over Mike’s phone, and they’re all a little giddy with it because Ben started looking up flights while they were all on the phone — at least Ben is _coming back_.

Eddie doesn’t say much, he just listens as they re-introduce themselves, listen as they mention _It_ , and then crashes his car. And as he’s sitting in the wreckage, and Georgie is trying the stifle laughter and Bill is _freaking the fuck out_ , and Mike’s got his arms around him like he thinks Bill is going to try to leap through the phone line to get to Eddie, they still haven’t said what they need to, yet. They sit there and listen to the New York traffic noises as Eddie waits for — the cops? AAA? Bill has, somewhat to his chagrin, never been to New York, for obvious reasons, and he has no idea what a traffic accident there entails.

“We need you to come back, Eddie,” Mike says, and thank _god_ for Mike — even when Bill can _feel_ the tension in his shoulders, he acts so calm. “We all promised to come back to fight It again if we need to.”

Eddie laughs, a nervous, staccato chuckle, and says, “I don’t know, man, I’m more of a lover than a — _shit_ , what was _that_ , I’m sorry, guys, that sounds like something _Richie_ would say, that’s so dumb.”

It does, and Eddie saying so has Bill laughing a little in relief, this time. After a pause, Eddie says, “Wait. I know I’m new to this whole remembering-my-childhood thing, but did we grow up with Rich fuckin’ _Tozier_?”

20)

Bill waits until Georgie’s next PT appointment to rally the troops, which gives them a few more sessions to _practice_ — Richie’s going to be carrying one of Beverly’s kitchen knives, so there’s not really much to practice, although he holds it out and menaces some trees, just to play along. It does give him the chance to enact one of his other ideas, though — he kidnaps a pair of his mother’s earrings, sterling silver blobs of metal that were a present from her mother, and which she never wears. She’ll never know they’re missing, Richie reasons, and even if she does, if she knew the full situation, she’d almost definitely prefer to lose them protecting her only son than have them collecting dust in the back of the closet.

The day after Beverly proves she’s got _wicked_ good aim with a slingshot, Richie sidles up to her when everyone else is being nosy about Mike’s bolt gun. Normally, Richie would be first in line to try to lose a finger messing with a heavy-duty weapon he has no business touching, and he sees Eddie give him an odd look when he hangs back, but Eds is as much of an adrenaline junkie as Richie is, and after a second he shrugs and shoulders his way up to get a look at the quiver of ammunition for the gun.

Richie’s not sure why he’s waiting till everyone is distracted, except that he feels about as stupid about this as Stanley looked like he did when he gave Richie the idea, talking about stakes like the clown-thing is a _vampire_ , and it’s not a werewolf _either_ , except for the time Richie saw — but he’s not going to talk about that, because he didn’t mention it that day in the park when they were all admitting to their own little nightmares, and because, despite ever-growing evidence to the contrary, he still thinks (hopes) it’s possible that that was a _dream_ , the time it was a werewolf.

Still, the hope that the slobbering monster with Richie’s hair and Richie’s glasses and Richie’s name on its letter jacket — like Richie has the coordination to earn a letter in anything — isn’t enough to stop Richie from wanting to be prepared just in case it _is_ a werewolf again, so when everyone else is distracted, he leans up against his bike near Beverly, reaches into his pocket, and tries to unobtrusively pass the earrings her way.

She looks down, and she looks confused. She laughs and says, “Thanks, Trashmouth, but they’re not really my style,” which, _fuck_ , means Richie’s going to have to _explain it_ to her.

He waits a minute for the other shoe to drop, because that’s something he’s been doing all summer — waiting for Beverly to say something that shows that she remembers his halting confession a while and ruin his life with it — waits for her to say _I didn’t think girls were your thing anyway_ , but she doesn’t. Instead, she just looks at him curiously, and he tells her, “They’re for, you know, the slingshot. Like silver bullets. I know that’s werewolves, but it’s like Stanley says, what if it _does_ work, right?”

Beverly nods like Richie has made a good point, and she pockets the earrings. Then she says, “I’m not going to tell anybody, you know.”

She says it in a totally normal tone and volume of voice, so Richie thinks he can be forgiven for thinking, at first, that she’s still talking about the earrings. “I mean, I don’t think any of us are going to, like, tell the clown? And it’s not actually a werewolf anyway, most of the time, so they’re probably not much of a secret weapon,” he shrugs.

But Beverly nudges his shoulder with hers and says, “No, I mean. I won’t tell the others that thing you told me. You can stop acting like I’m going to throw you to the wolves.”

This is something Richie has hoped she would promise while also dreading the idea that she might bring it up for pretty much the entire summer, but now that she has, the way she says it makes him feel squirmy and uncomfortable. “They’re not — they’re not _wolves_ ,” he mutters like he thinks she means it literally, like he thinks she’d still be hanging around if either of them thought the other guys were _cruel_. 

Beverly nods, says, “I know, I didn’t mean it like that. I just mean, it’s not my business to tell anyone.” She’s not looking him in the eye, and her voice is deceptively light, and Richie is about to walk into a scuzzy, crackhead monster house, and he can’t imagine that any of that upcoming adventure could be scarier than the way they’re both feeling out how to talk about something they don’t have any language for except for the one that gets graffitied onto bathroom stalls at Derry High.

“Thanks,” Richie tells her, and hopes that’s enough.

Then Bill rounds them up, and it’s time to ride down to the scuzzy crackhead monster house that apparently tried to eat Eddie once, but at least Richie has a kitchen knife, and the one person he told the one thing he never wanted to tell anyone gives him a small smile as she swings her leg over the seat of her bike.

42)

“We need you, Richie,” Mike says. “ _It_ ’s back.”

“Right, sounds like a blast,” Richie dazedly tells Bill and Mike and fuckin’ _Georgie Denbrough_ , of all people. Then he snaps his phone closed and vomits over the railing of the fire escape.

When Steve finds him, he’s pretty sure he can still go out on stage — _“Just do what you always do!” “What’s that?” “Start talking!”_ — because for the last twenty years of his life, there’s been nothing he couldn’t perform through. He’s gone out on stage minutes after news of his mother’s stroke, his loss of a job he badly wanted, and the end of several relationships secret enough that he couldn’t admit to anyone in his life that they’d taken place without undoing all the solid hiding he’d done of the relationship to begin with.

Today, though, he looks down at his shaky hands and asks for bourbon, because today he doesn’t feel like himself — or rather, he feels like himself for the first time since he can remember. Instead, it’s twenty years of successful career and rock-solid repression of everything but the elastic ease he gets in his voice when he goes out on stage that feels like a lie. He downs the shot and ignores Steve’s observation that his hands are still shaking, and he walks out on stage thinking of the pile of cash in his go-bag at home, of the quiet waiting he’s been doing for so many years when everyone in his life thought he couldn’t do anything quietly. He thinks about how he could take that trashy, faded, nineties duffle with him to Derry, like Mike suggested, or he could take it and _not_ do that, just take it and _go_ , because if whatever’s waiting for him in Derry just made his entire body clench up in fear like this, there’s a good chance it’s not going to be much of a good time.

And really, what do they need him for, anyway, he thinks, pulling the mic off the stand and turning his face automatically to the stage lights. What do _they_ , Bill and Mike and Georgie and the other faces that are still blurred in his memory, need from him in a dangerous situation? He’s Richie Trashmouth, he’s no good in a fight, he’s just good at getting hit. He’s still holding the mic in his hand, and he’s saying, “I’m Richie Trashmouth — Trashmouth—” and this is not how his intro went yesterday, but also, he _knows_ this, he knows every word of this routine as well as if he wrote them himself, he’s out on stage and there’s certainly no going back now, _the only way out is through, Trashmouth,_ and his inner monologue hasn’t sounded this croaky and adolescent in years.

“So my girlfriend caught me masturbating to her friend’s Facebook page and now I’m in Masturbators Anonymous,” and it’s rote, yes, but Richie’s got _timing_ , his rote performances _land_ , he gets the chuckle this line earns as the set-up for the punchline, he gets there, but then his mind is blank. The whole routine, which he’s pretty sure he’s been doing in his sleep, it’s gone. “I forgot the rest of the joke,” he tells the audience, the faceless audience which is not actually, apparently, his oldest friend — _because that’s Stan Uris_ his mind supplies in a show of memory that has been completely absent throughout his adult life. _Thanks for showing up, I guess,_ he thinks to his own brain.

“You _SUCK_ ,” someone shouts from the audience, and given the way he just bombed, he can’t bring himself to disagree. _Fuck_ , he thinks, standing marooned in the middle of the hot stage lights with nothing to say to these hundreds of people. _I have to go back to Derry._

21)

It’s not just that it looks like a real-life version of a cartoon of a haunted house that makes no one want to go in, once they get there, Mike thinks. It doesn’t _help_ that it looks, in living color, like something that came into being after someone sat down and made a list of all the things about an abandoned house that could hurt you or freak you out. Eddie takes one look at the place and says, “You’re all caught up on your tetanus shots, guys, right?” and for once, Mike can see his point. The place doesn’t just look like something that _could_ give you lockjaw, it looks like it _wants_ to.

“Put _needles_ in me, Eds?” Richie asks in mock horror. “What is it you Christ-cult freaks say? _My_ body is a _temple_ , I don’t need shots.”

Eddie shoves him. “What the _fuck_ , your dad is a _dentist_ , you don’t _not believe in medicine_ , don’t be _stupid_.”

They’re pretty funny when they’re together — Mike knew Eddie a little before, and he always talked fast, but Mike has never seen him get riled up like this with anyone other than Richie Tozier.

“Shouldn’t some of us stay outside?” Stanley suggests, and for all their preparation, he sounds scared. “Just in case something goes wrong, so we can go for help?”

He’s clearly asking because he doesn’t want to go in, but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong. When Bill asks them all if anyone else wants to stay outside, Mike doesn’t want to say that he does — Bill looks lost and very young on the steps to the haunted house, and there’s something weird and noble about what he wants to do, but Mike doesn’t lie, and when he looks at how he actually feels, he has to admit that every bone in his body is freezing up at the thought of walking through that door. When he looks around, every other hand is raised as well, and Mike doesn’t know whether that makes it feel better or worse.

They draw straws, after that — _you guys are lucky we’re not measuring dicks_ , thanks, Richie, and then Mike is standing in the yard full of drooping, sad-faced sunflowers, watching Richie and Eddie and Bill walk into the house. Stanley makes a choked sound in the back of his throat, and Mike wraps an arm around him. He’d thought, when they drew straws, that he was getting off easy, but there’s something terrifying about just standing there still, waiting, and watching the house swallow the others up.

They wait, and they watch, and they don’t make their way up the steps to go in after Bill and Richie and Eddie until they hear the sounds of yelling, crashing, and struggle in the front room.

43)

For weeks before Adrian Mellon saw what he saw, from the time the first child went missing, Bill has been having nightmares. Mike told him, when Bill came home from the crime scene where Laurie Anne Winterbarger — a freckle-faced five-year-old — disappeared that they didn’t know for sure that it was the clown. The detective at the scene, a young guy named Wilson who’s a Denbrough Brothers books fan, and who occasionally passes Bill some information, said the same thing. Not about the clown, obviously, but that they didn’t know if the little girl was dead, or taken. “Sometimes kids go on walkabout,” he said, and it’s so blindingly stupid Bill can’t even respond to it.

But Mike says there are plenty of creeps in the world who are fully human, and he’s got the newspaper clippings to prove it, and Georgie backs him up on the slight variability between the 27-year intervals, and then Mike says, “We don’t even know if it would work, if we tried to call them back before it was time,” and Georgie nods thoughtfully and says something about how “The Boys Who Cry Wolf” would be a great band name, and Bill was clearly outnumbered, so he waits.

He waited, and he dreamed, and when he woke up, Mike pushed his sweaty hair back from his his forehead and told him, “It’s almost time, it’s almost time, and then it’ll be over, it’ll be over and then we’ll get to get out of this place, then we’ll get to _live_ ,” and Bill could almost believe him.

The night after they make those six phone calls, Bill sleeps and he does not dream.

Instead, Mike does.

Mike doesn’t fall asleep again after nightmares, at least not right away. When he’s shaken off the heavy, moving-through-honey feeling in his limbs, Bill herds him downstairs and makes tea. He doesn’t ask what the dream was about because he’s pretty sure he knows.

He’s right about the general subject, it turns out, but not about the specifics — that is, it’s about _It_ , and their friends, and about the fact that their twenty-seven—years of preparation time is up, but it’s not about any of the things about those factors that _Bill_ feels so worried about.

Mike nurses his mug of chamomile and says, “Do you think we called them all back here to die? They’re all on their way, and they might not even remember what they agreed to.”

Bill himself feels relief at the thought that their five once-best friends are all making their way, from near and far away, right back to where they all started. He can only picture their child-selves, but even the thought of those kids that they were makes him feel stronger, more fortified, more prepared than he has for all the years they’ve been gone.

“It’s the right thing to do,” Bill insists, just the same way he did way back when, standing in a circle in the sunshine and having them each swear in blood. “We know now better than we ever did then that no one else has come close to stopping It — it’s either up to us, or it’s admitting that It has the power to do whatever It wants — to _feed on_ whatever It wants,” and just saying that out loud makes Bill shudder.

Mike nods, and everything Bill is saying is something they’ve said before, passed back and forth between them until it feels inescapably true, but Mike still looks unsure. “If we call them here for It,” he says, “And they die.”

He doesn’t complete the thought, but Bill hears it anyway, _If we call them here to die, have we killed them?_

If Mike’s not going to say it out loud, though, then Bill isn’t going to answer it. He turns away from the kettle and walks over to where Mike is sitting at a stool by the kitchen island. It’s not often that Bill stands taller than Mike, and the top of his head isn’t Bill’s usual angle. He puts a hand on Mike’s shoulder and sags against him. The action feels as inadequate as the words would. _If we have, it’s too late to take it back now. They’re on their way._

22)

On the day after Neibolt, Stanley shows up at Bev’s house as promised, to take the bloody cleaning rags down to the laundromat.

“I didn’t think you were coming,” she says, leaning against the doorway in a casual way she wouldn’t have dreamed of on the first day she lead this boy up to her apartment, glancing around furtively to make sure no neighbors were looking out the windows, waiting to see something to carry tales about back to her father. Today, Bev stands there, a girl who has faced down true monsters, a girl who isn’t afraid of the turn-the-other-cheek cowards who populate her life, and she stares Stanley Uris in the eye and says, “I figured after you all walked away, we wouldn’t be hanging out anymore,” because they did, Mike and Ben and Stanley and Richie all saw the something that had always been wrong about this town, looked it in the eye, and walked away. Only Bill seemed to feel, as she felt, that burning need not to ignore the rot at the center of the town the way everyone in Derry always did.

Stan is always brave in his own way, though; he doesn’t flinch at the sharpness in her tone, he looks her straight in the eye, and he says, “Just because I don’t want to die in the sewer doesn’t mean I won’t follow through on the things I say I’m going to do,” and then, after a moment, eyes still fixed on her, “And it doesn’t mean I don’t want to still be friends, Beverly.”

When he puts it like that, it doesn’t sound quite as awful as the confirmation of the mass of indifference and horribleness that she’s been building it up to in her head, and when Stan smiles tentatively, she finds herself smiling back. He holds up a handful of shining silver quarters and asks, “Shall we?”

Bev gathers the blood-stained cleaning cloths from under the sink and bundles them into a bag, first because she doesn’t want to look at the blood, but also because she reflects that it probably would look kind of strange to make her way to the laundromat with a teenage boy and an armful of loose cleaning rags, anyway, even if they don’t _look_ bloody to most people.

“If my dad hears about this he’ll think — he’ll ask if this was a date,” Bev tells Stan while they’re walking. That’s not what he’ll think at all, actually — he’ll twist the idea of going to the laundromat with a boy into something filthy and horrible, but she can’t bring herself to articulate the dirty, awful things her father will read into it to Stanley, with his shy smile and his pressed shirts and his careful, nervous, blushing look away every time she strips down to jump in the quarry.

She’s fairly sure Stanley doesn’t like her _like that_ , and even more sure that, if he did, he’d be just as halting and weirdly, old-fashionedly respectful about it as he is, quietly, about just about everything else. He shoots a sly grin her way and asks, “Are you saying it isn’t?” and she laughs.

“Here I was thinking I was finally going to go on my first date, and you’re telling me a laundromat trip with a friend doesn’t count?”

She thinks, absently, that it should scare her more, what her father will do if he hears about this — what he’ll _think_ , yes, but more importantly, how he’ll react to that thought. She’s the girl who stabbed the clown-thing through the head yesterday, though, and even if that didn’t kill It, it’s left her feeling like the horrors pressing in on them are more harm-able than she’s ever felt before. She thinks that’s some of why she’s so impatient with Stanley’s fear, with Richie’s, with Ben’s. Beverly has never been safe, and so what she saw in the Neibolt house was not the loss of an illusion of safety, but a confirmation of something that she has only ever hoped to be true before; that the things that can harm her can also be harmed _by_ her.


	4. four.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> last real chapter before the epilogue!

23)

In the weeks after Neibolt, Bill doesn’t apologize to Richie and he doesn’t pay attention to his mother’s worried nagging about trying to sleep in his own bed at night, and he doesn’t talk to much of anyone except for Beverly and Georgie. During the day, he and Georgie borrow their father’s fishing equipment, swing by Beverly’s house to see if she wants to join them, and then make the long trek out of town to fish where the creek is a little deeper and a little further from the sewer treatment plant.

It’s far enough outside of town that it almost feels like they might be outside of Pennywise’s reach, for a few hours at a time. Bill is pretty sure it technically puts them over the line into Shokopiwah territory, where they’re not actually allowed to be, but he’s also pretty sure that, at worst, they’ll send a handful of kids off with a warning, at least the first time. And even if they don’t, the idea of human consequences feels so much less scary than the idea of spending their days in Derry, knowing what’s waiting there.

During the night, Bill lies in bed and waits until he hears his parents make their way to bed, and then he pads down the hall to Georgie’s room. When he’s there, he can sleep, but even Georgie’s sleeping, alive company can’t stop him from dreaming.

1)

Before he takes the boat out into the rain, Georgie leans up and hugs Bill, and they mostly don’t do that, not unless someone is scared or going to summer camp, so it’s strange that Bill leans down toward him to meet him, like he’s expecting it, and it’s strange that Georgie does it at all, and it’s strange that it feels like a kind of goodbye when Georgie is just putting on his rain boots to splash around in the puddles for a half an hour, and after that he’ll surely be right back by Bill’s side, climbing damply into bed beside him and demanding that Bill read him more of _The Hobbit_.

It’s strange enough that Bill tells him, “T-t-take the walkie talkie with you,” even though he’s made the boat for Georgie specifically so Georgie will leave the house for a while and Bill can have a few minutes to himself. Georgie nods, switches the walkie talkie on, and starts his running commentary on the slipperiness of the stairs before he’s even out of the house. Bill makes a few quiet, agreeing noises back when Georgie pauses for breath, and some of the weird tension Bill felt over their goodbye melts.

The rain is really coming down, and the water is rushing in the gutters, so Bill isn’t surprised when, through the walkie talkie, Georgie starts fretting because the boat is going too fast, it’s too _fast_ , but he is surprised when Georgie shrieks. Bill’s brother is little, and he’s afraid of some things, but he’s usually pretty brave, even about heading down into the basement, so when he screams, Bill finds himself shooting out of bed.

When Georgie speaks again, he sounds calmer, and Bill slows, one foot in his own rain boot, but then another voice murmurs in the background, quiet and insidious, and a part of Bill thinks it could be anybody — a neighbor worried at the sound of Georgie’s scream, maybe — but there’s something wrong about the voice, something _off_ , and Bill is already half-way into his boots, he might as well throw on a rain coat and walk down to check.

“My dad says not to take things from strangers,” Bill’s little brother’s solemn little voice comes through the speaker as he opens the front door, and he feels almost silly for his haste, but also, _good job, Georgie_ , anyone who’s making Bill’s trusting brother trot out the stranger danger speech probably shouldn’t be left alone with him. Bill takes the porch steps down to the sidewalk two at a time and follows the flow of the water in the gutters, and he sees Georgie’s little yellow rain slicker crouched over near the storm drain at exactly the same moment that he hears another bloodcurdling scream. Bill drops the walkie talkie and sprints down the street to where the massive puddle of rainwater is now stained with blood.

24)

One morning, when Bill wakes up, he is in Georgie’s bed, but Georgie is not beside him.

It doesn’t _have_ to mean something, Bill reminds himself, and he makes his way downstairs to where his mother is standing by the coffee pot, fixing herself a mug. “Where’s Georgie, mom?” he asks, and his mother turns to him with a kind of blank glassiness in her face.

“I think he must have gone out with his friends early this morning.”

“What do you mean, you _think_?”

There’s something strange and vague in his mother’s eyes, an unfocused look he remembers from when he looked in the ambulance window, all those months ago, after the door closed behind where she was holding Georgie’s icy little hand, and saw, for just a moment, a clown waving at him from the passenger’s seat beside the paramedic. 

Bill’s mother turns around and tells him, “Now, why don’t you sit down for breakfast, Billy,” but he’s already making his way out the front door. He almost wasn’t fast enough to get to Georgie last time, but at least this time he has Silver on his side. Bill mounts up onto his bike, and then he rides to beat the devil.

44)

Beverly stands outside of the Chinese restaurant, the one Mike had named in his text the last time she’d dared to check her phone, because even blocking Tom’s number didn’t make her feel any safer from him, and she kept feeling like opening or using her phone at all might give him information about her. After Mike’s text with their meeting place, she’d shut the phone down and let it sink to the bottom of her purse, a useless brick of plastic and glass and metal.

She’s at the right restaurant, though; the garish lights assure her of it, and so does the feeling of rightness in her gut. Still, she can’t quite bring herself to step inside, and so she’s staring up at the building when a voice she doesn’t _quite_ recognize, but also doesn’t quite _not_ speaks, words she won’t remember until much later are also the first thing she ever said to him, twenty-seven years ago and in another lifetime, at the very beginning of that horrible summer. “Is there a password, or something?”

When she turns around, his face looks just as _not quite familiar_ as his voice sounds. Even when she remembers, it feels strange, this man’s face so different from the boy she remembers. But of course she hugs him anyway, because he’s Ben, he’s the _new kid_ , and even when she can’t quite remember how they all met each other, she remembers that, within this little group, she and Ben were always each other’s, a little bit. Both a little on the outside of the group, both unused to being part of a _team_ the way the ones who were friends before them were. She hugs him, and she feels those unexpectedly strong arms around her, but she also feels something else.

A few years ago, Kay had a fling with a grad student — a sweet girl with dark curls and a Psych degree and a penchant for self-help books, and it hadn’t lasted, and when Kay had called Beverly up to meet her at a bar to commiserate, Kay had said, “I should have known there was nothing in it, she was all obsessed with _this_.” Then she’d pulled a book out of her bag, grainy dark photos and sentimental captions and Beverly had seen what Kay meant, the book was nothing Kay would have ever taken seriously, but one of the captions had caught Beverly’s eye. _And then my soul saw you and it kind of went, “Oh, there you are, I’ve been looking for you,”_ it read, and Beverly had thought, _I know how that feels_ , but she couldn’t think how she would, or with who.

She feels it now, smelling Ben’s soft, dark aftershave, reaching an arm up to cup the short hairs on the back of his neck, drowning in tenderness because she couldn’t picture his child’s face until seconds before she’d seen him as an adult but she’s _missed_ him, and she has missed feeling this safe.

And then Richie’s there, and she feels it all over again, that sharp spark of recognition, of knowing someone and being known, but not the way Tom does it, not like a weapon. Richie knows her like a gift, calls her Molly Ringwald like there’s any bite at all in the nickname, like they hadn’t rented _Pretty In Pink_ together that summer, one sunny morning when his mother was shopping and the other Losers were busy and they were alone in his house. He’d pretended to be reluctant, but just a little, just enough for plausible deniability, she’d thought. But he’d watched the whole way through with only a minimum of running commentary, and when she’d laughed at the prom dress at the end of the movie, he’d challenged her, _oh, like you could do better?_ , and then, when she’d sketched out a quick alternate design, agreed, _oh, okay, so you could do better_.

Ben knows her, too, she thinks, though his knowing was always a little bit more moony-eyed — it had made her feel powerful, back then, and she’s a little chagrinned to find that it still does, his warm gaze fixed on her back as the three of them make their way into the restaurant.

Bill grew up shorter than Beverly would have expected. He’d been a lanky boy at thirteen, all limbs and eyes and floppy red-brown hair. By the looks of it, he hasn’t gotten much taller, just filled out a little, hair a little coarser and further back on his face, not so baby-fine. He looks like a man they might have seen around town when they were children, plain t-shirt and flannel thrown over the top, sleeves pushed up to his elbows. When he calls them into the room, though, she can see that he’s still got that instinctive sense of authority that she couldn’t identify as a kid, but she can see now has so much to do with being a big brother.

The little brother in question is also there, Beverly confirms, after squinting for a moment at the man a few steps behind Bill. Georgie Denbrough has grown out of his gap teeth some time in the past twenty-seven years, but he’s still got the same infectious smile, and Beverly finds herself grinning back at him, strange and giddy. Then there’s _Mike_ , who’s grown into a gently-smiling mountain of a man, and Eddie, still suffused with enough nervous energy to power the entire restaurant and then some, and then they’re standing around the table, no one taking a seat yet because it feels like when they do, that’s when the serious part, the part Beverly can’t remember but is at the same time terrified and furious about, will have to begin. She catches Bill and Mike staring at each other in a strange, charged way, but then Georgie Denbrough breaks in like he can hear whatever silent conversation Bill and Mike are having and wants no part in it, saying, “Come on, let’s eat, I want to see if I can get all your famous friends to name-drop.”

Eddie sputters and Georgie pats his arm. “It’s okay, Eddie, you’re still cool even if you haven’t been to Fashion Week,” and that one was a dig aimed at _Bev_ , so she pulls out a chair and settles in.

25)

Beverly is the one with the slingshot, the one who stabbed the clown with the fence post, and the only one who didn’t walk away when Bill said they had to go back and kill It, so it’s Beverly Bill calls from the payphone at the center of town. She answers the phone, which is lucky because Bill remembers Beverly’s fear at the idea that her father might find out she’s hanging out with a gang of boys, but it’s a worry he only remembers too late to do any good, and he knows, with a twinge of guilt at the memory, that if her father had answered, he would have blown her cover in his worry for Georgie.

“It’s back,” he tells her, “It’s got Georgie, I’m going after It.” He doesn’t ask her to go with him because he has a feeling that asking might be not quite fair, with this kind of danger, but he can’t deny to himself that he’s hoping she’ll offer to come with him anyway, and she doesn’t let him down.

“I’ll be at Niebolt in twenty minutes,” she tells him, and, “I know they left after last time, but I think you’d better call the others, too. I — Stanley came over the other day and — well, I just think we’re stronger together, I think you should call them.”

Bill wasn’t going to, but as she says it, he feels that she’s right. There is something special, something strong, about the seven of them together, and Bill knows that the rest of them are scared, but when you’re going up against an impossible enemy, you have to use all the tools you’ve got. In the background, Bill hears a voice that isn’t familiar specifically because Beverly has taken such care all summer to make sure they never meet. Her father asks, “Who are you talking to, Bevvie?” and she calls back, “No one, Dad, wrong number,” before murmuring into the phone, “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

Bill thinks of his mother’s blank, unconcerned expression over breakfast, and hisses as quickly as he can before she hangs up, “Beverly, this place isn’t right, and grown-ups can’t see It so they can’t fight It, I think the clown was in my mom this morning, a little.”

In the background, Bill can hear Beverly’s father sing-song, “I don’t _believe_ you, Bevvie,” and in his ear she says, “Got it,” and it’s not _good_ , whatever is going on in Beverly’s apartment on the other side of town, but Bill is too far away to reach her, and he has to call the others and then he has to save _Georgie_ , so he blinks his eyes shut tight for a moment and just _trusts_ her to get out safely with everything he has in him. Then he reaches into his pocket for another quarter and dials Stanley’s number.

45)

Bill tells them about Stanley: “He, uh. He tried to cut his wrists. After we called him. He’s in the hospital for a few days, and I don’t think we should wait for him to try to, uh, do something about this. I think we’re all we’ve got,” and Eddie watches Richie’s hands as he reaches out for a fortune cookie and starts fiddling with it instead of meeting anybody’s eyes.

Richie’s as jittery as he was as a teenager, which is less surprising than the fact that Eddie even remembers that, vague impressions of getting back loaned pencils covered with bite marks, of reaching out and whacking Richie’s arm until he stopped jiggling his leg, of declaring after midnight at sleepovers no-sugar zones or none of them would be able to get any sleep over the sound of Richie’s ceaseless chatter. Eddie remembers exclaiming in disgust over the pencils, kicking back against the tapping feet until they both got sent out of the classroom, and staying up with an insomniac Richie Tozier all night, without nearly as much reluctance as he’d pretended.

It’s a horrible thing to hear, even about someone as vague as Stan Uris still is in Eddie’s memory, so it makes sense that Bill has an awful look on this face as he tells them, and it makes sense that Mike reaches out to him, lays a big hand on Bill’s wrist, because it’s comfort, a comforting gesture, Eddie thinks he’s gone without this kind of friendship for so long he doesn’t know what’s normal, what’s the normal way for friends as close as they once were to show their affection. Richie’s still toying with a fortune cookie, turning it over and over in his hands, but Eddie sees his eyes fix on where Mike and Bill are touching, too.

“It got to him,” Ben says about Stan, and even though he’s sitting right there at the table beside Eddie, it feels like he’s saying it from somewhere very far away.

“Pennywise,” Beverly agrees, and Eddie thinks, absently, that it’s a very stupid name. Richie’s fingers go tense on the fortune cookie, and the cookie cracks, and then all hell breaks loose.

After, in the lobby of the hotel, hearing little Georgie Denbrough describe the deaths he’s been dreaming for them, including a death Stan only just narrowly escaped, Eddie keeps hearing that sound, the crack of the fortune cookie blending in his memory with the snap of the bone in his arm, the first time they went into that house. A few years ago, Eddie had gotten sick, properly sick, pneumonia down into his lungs and they’d taken an X-ray to confirm. The lab technician had commented on the old break in his arm, and Eddie had reached around in his memory for its cause, surprised to come up blank. He’d been so sure that he’d never broken a bone, but he’s remembering it now, Richie’s panicked hands turning Eddie’s face to meet his eyes despite the cackling of the clown in the background and the very real danger It represented.

They can’t — they can’t not do this, this time. That’s what Eddie is getting out of this extraordinarily stupid conversation. They can’t kick the can down the road till next time, _Richie_ , because, “We’d be like seventy years old, asshole,” and Eddie is getting the sneaking suspicion that they can’t run away, either. He’s always known there was some kind of doom hanging over him, but he also thought, most of the time, that it was coming in the form of a crashed car or a robbery of his house gone wrong or a blood infection. Somehow, _demon-clown_ never made the list.

“We think it’s an alien, actually,” Georgie Denbrough says from where he’s leaned up against the door frame to the hotel bar.

“No we _don’t_ ,” Bill shoots back with all the cadence of an argument as old and as easy as whether Han shot first.

Georgie rolls his eyes. “Okay, _Mike and I_ think it’s an alien, _William_ actually really liked _The DaVinci Code_ and wants everything to be demons.”

“There are no demons in _The DaVinci Code_ ,” Bill says, shooting a betrayed look Georgie’s way, and it is _surreal_ , to hear them talking lightly, in an everyday way, about the worst thing Eddie has ever experienced or probably even heard about. Mike tells Bill, “We don’t blame you, Billy, it’s not your fault Sharon dragged you both to Mass once a week growing up,” and he says it so _easily_ , so _teasing_ , it makes an old, childhood part of Eddie feel left out.

“I don’t care if it’s an alien or a demon, I just care that it doesn’t get a chance to wreck my pretty face,” Richie says, just a little bit too loud, gesturing vaguely to his entire skull-area and saying, “This is the moneymaker, okay?”

“We’re not going to let that happen,” Mike says, and he’s left the teasing aside again, he sounds like some kind of heartwarming football coach from one of those movies really macho guys occasionally allow themselves to cry over, and Eddie hates that it actually does reassure him, a little. “We’ve got a plan,” Mike says.

26)

They all come, one-two-three-four-five-six-seven, and Richie could almost be surprised by that, after the way they left things, a few weeks ago, after Eddie almost died and Bill punched Richie in the face, and everybody yelled. Richie hasn’t seen any of them since, except Stanley. He’s talked to Eddie on the phone a couple of times, but only ever when Eddie’s the one who answers — when Mrs. K picks up, even when Richie puts on his nicest talking-to-teachers voice and tries really hard not to be a little shit, she won’t put Eddie on the phone, and she won’t pass on any messages.

But _Richie_ is here anyway, so he guesses it’s no surprise that the rest of them are. Beverly has been on Bill’s “fight a clown” team from the beginning, so she’s no surprise. And Eddie has never been good at walking away from fights, even if he should, so he’s not a surprise, either. Stanley is Georgie’s babysitter sometimes, and Richie has always thought that Stan’s patience with Richie’s own bullshit was a sign that Stan would have been a good big brother, so it’s not a surprise that Stan shows up for the kid, either. Ben is clearly stupid in love with Beverly, and now that he’s not actively spilling his guts out of holes in his body, it’s not a surprise that he wants to follow where she leads, and Mike — Richie still doesn’t know much about Mike. Mike is quiet not like kids are quiet, where they’re actually just shy, and all they need is for Richie to annoy them into submission before they loosen up and aren’t so quiet anymore. Mike is quiet like a serious adult is quiet, like there are a lot of thoughts in his head and he’s careful about which ones he lets out. Mike is quiet the way Stanley would like to be quiet, but he’s too invested in always having the last word to actually follow through.

Richie doesn’t know much of anything about Mike, and that kind of scares him, here and now when they’re about to, again, voluntarily walk into a scary crackhead house infested with a vicious murder-clown, but Mike also brought a bolt gun with him, so Richie guesses he can stay.

Part of Richie wants to, like, _say_ something to Bill. Sure, he’d like an apology for the punch in the face, and he thinks watching Eddie almost die in front of him ought to mean that Bill should cut him some slack, but also — but _also_. But also Georgie is gone, and obviously Bill was right about the fact that even staying away from It wouldn’t keep them safe, and probably Richie should tell Bill that he, Richie, knows it. Except that also, the fact that he’s here at all is pretty much an acknowledgment, and _also_ Bill is staring away into the middle distance with haunted eyes, and Richie is not convinced that Bill will hear anything he has to say until they get Georgie back, anyway. Richie doesn’t say anything, doesn’t say anything, and then they’re climbing down a well and the worst thing is that this is stupid-dangerous even without the demon clown because Eddie only has one arm to work with, and the bricks are slippery, and the rope is splintery, and Eddie doesn’t say a word in complaint which just makes it worse because Eddie can _always_ complain, it’s one of his superpowers, and this is what Richie’s still thinking about when Mike is about to climb down the well and Bowers gets him instead.

Among the four original Losers — Richie, Bill, Eddie, Stan — Richie knows he holds the dubious honor of being the one who gets punched in the face the most, but over the course of the summer, he’s started to get the feeling that the way Bowers goes after Mike is different. The rest of them can sometimes manage to stay out of Bowers’ way, but with Mike, it’s like any time Bowers sees Mike not actively suffering, he takes it as a personal insult. Mike is the last person who should be alone with Bowers up there.

Except that maybe he isn’t? Because then Bowers is falling, and Richie has never thought of Bowers as someone who can really be hurt, but Richie is pretty sure no one survives a fall like that. Bowers is maybe dead and Mike is fine, and together they walk deeper into hell.

The first Georgie they see isn’t actually Georgie.

Richie can see it right away, and he knows without taking a survey that the others do, too, because this Georgie is dressed like he must have been the day the clown first got him, in a yellow slicker and shiny new galoshes, and one arm of the rain slicker is clearly empty, which is — normal, now, but it’s dripping blood, which is _not_.

The false Georgie says, “Why didn’t you protect me, Billy?” and Bill, the _idiot_ , tries to charge forward, only stops when Mike throws out an arm across his chest to stop him.

“That’s not George,” Stan, says, and his voice is still shaky and his face is still bleeding and Bill should _listen to him_ , but he doesn’t, just tries to push Mike aside until Beverly’s reaching out to hold him back, too.

“You let me go out alone because you didn’t want me _bothering you_ ,” False Georgie says like this is a terrible fucking thing, and not the natural order of a sibling relationship. Richie’s big sister hasn’t wanted him hanging around her since he got too gangly to dress up in her old Halloween costumes like a giant doll.

“Bill, It just wants to distract you from finding the real George!” Beverly tells him.

This is actually enough to break through, Bill tears his eyes away from the thing that isn’t his brother to look at Bev, and when he’s looking away, the thing starts to change. Its face shifts, still in the child’s body Richie recognizes, into a sneering man’s face, and a sneering man’s voice says, “Are you still my little girl, Bevvie?”

Richie thinks it’s objectively the worst of any of the things they’ve seen so far, this awful, cold, immobile, smiling face, and the way the body is starting to grow into a loom over them, but Beverly stares up at this apparition and says in a voice that only shakes a little, “I’ve already killed you once today.”

“Oh is that what you think?” that horrible, smug voice purrs, and something about the certainty in it seems to shake Bev’s resolve. She wavers, and Richie thinks it’s probably the rest of their turn, after Bev got caught pulling Bill out of the thing’s hypnotizing pull, so he steps forward with the kitchen knife, and the smug man is shifting, he’s changing, and the childhood part of Richie that still wishes on birthday candles crosses all of the fingers of his soul that no one can tell that the werewolf has Richie’s eyes, Richie’s face, no longer the letter jacket with Richie’s name but that same red Hawaiian shirt he was wearing at the arcade the other day when Bowers — when Bowers—

A familiar silver earring cracks right into the glasses on the werewolf’s face, shattering it and refracting it like pieces of a mirror, the monster broken down into shards so Richie can breathe again, and where the _thing_ was, Bill is charging past because he’s seen Georgie, the real one.

No one is about to let Bill go alone to where Georgie is hanging, suspended, with his face turned towards a series of horrible glowing balls of light. In the crush of following after him, Richie catches Beverly’s eye. She’s got the slingshot still gripped in her hand, fingers curled around the basket to keep it loaded, and she shoots a crooked grin his way.

46)

“All living things must abide by the shape they inhabit,” Mike says, and he says it like he’s quoting something, like the words have some weight or authority. “Pennywise can shift It’s shape to be what we fear the most, but when It’s in that shape, It has to live by the rules of that shape, which means it has the weaknesses of the shape It’s in. We beat it by knowing ourselves well enough to know what it is that we’re afraid of, and by knowing what the limits of those fears are.”

“Like the werewolf and silver bullets,” Beverly says, and Ben finds himself turning his head at the sound of her voice without even thinking about it. She’s been just a shadow in the back of his mind for so long, he feels almost overwhelmed at her presence. He remembers, vaguely, a flash of fur, the first time in Neibolt — not a werewolf, maybe, but a cartoon cut-out of one, there and then gone in a moment at a flash of silver from Beverly’s slingshot.

Ben hadn’t remembered remembering that, but now that he has, he can see it clear as day, young Bev bright in the dappled sunlight of the Barrens, knocking down every single can lined up as a target, one after another.

“Exactly,” Mike says. 

Georgie says, “We can’t change what we’re afraid of, but we can be ready for it. The most basic part of the laws of the shape It’s wearing is that if It has an alive body, that body can be killed, but the other parts of it are the real wild cards, and that’s where we can get our advantage, but we couldn’t really plan for exactly what that advantage was going to be because it all depends on you guys.”

Bill takes over next, and Ben is starting to get a sense for how they write together now, as adults, each one picking up where the other leaves off. Bill says, “We’ve figured out that the clown likes to go for kids a lot of the time because kids’ fears are a lot more likely to be of specific things it can embody, not just, like, feelings. Not a lot of eight-year-olds are afraid of the long, slow march of time and the dawning realization that they’ve never lived up to their potential.”

“Speak for _yourself_ ,” Richie says, and Eddie shoves his shoulder.

“Don’t even lie, Trashmouth, you were about as deep as the punchline of a Bazooka comic when you were eight.”

“Aww, Eds, you remember!”

It’s nice, Ben thinks absently, to hear them dropping back into their old rhythm like they never lost it. Annoying as all fucking get-out, but nice just the same.

“So we th-think,” Bill barrels on like he hasn’t heard them, though there’s a smile hovering around the edges of his mouth, “That It’ll mostly go after those childhood fears again, but we don’t know for sure. To be safe, we should probably talk about some of the adult stuff, too.”

“I think a lot of mine are the same,” Ben admits, feeling a little shy about it. What kind of freak hasn’t updated his emotional anxieties since he was just a kid? “Not all of them, obviously — I haven’t had much reason to be afraid of getting chased down by Henry Bowers since he’s been locked up, but I used to worry that — that you were right,” he admits, turning to look at Eddie. “About the clubhouse. I used to worry that no matter how sure I was, and how sturdy I knew it should be, something was going to go wrong or fall in and hurt one of us, when it was supposed to be the thing I had to offer us, to help.”

“And now?” Bill asks, but he asks it like he already knows the answer.

“Last year, after my BBC tower went up, I couldn’t sleep for weeks, dreaming about it coming down with people still inside.”

It’s a horrible thought, and a horrible image, and Ben isn’t surprised when no one knows how to respond for a moment. Then Georgie laughs. “Well, I don’t know how we’re going to find a weakness in that one. You couldn’t have been scared of butterflies, or something, Ben?”

27)

Bill had been right, _It_ had been in her father that morning — or maybe It had removed a layer of restraint in him, leaving him to act on all of the worst things she’d ever been ashamed to have even considered long enough to be afraid of. But she’d looked into that familiar face and known there was nothing left to reason with, nothing left to appease or appeal to, and she’d done the only thing left to her.

After, she’d biked down to the Barrens to fetch her slingshot. No sense in going in unarmed, after all. And as she left the clubhouse, she’d grabbed one more weapon to stuff into her knapsack. Now, in the impossible cave at the end of the sewer tunnels, Beverly sees Bill scramble forward after the floating figure that she thinks actually is Georgie, this time, and she follows because he’s clearly going in hot with no plan at all and he’s not _ready_ —

Bill jumps for where Georgie’s legs are dangling, far above his head, and he can’t reach because of course he can’t, Beverly could have told him that just by looking at the distance, but he gets closer than he ought to be able to, just based on his height, and she realizes, after a moment, that it’s because each time he jumps, he floats up, just a little, just like Georgie, just like —

Eddie points up at the figures whirling slowly, like a reverse-whirlpool made of ghosts, and says, “It’s the missing kids,” but it’s more of them than that, it’s generations of children and lost people in varying states of decay, propelled through the air in slow-motion like they’re falling through honey, and Bill keeps almost starting to float, just like them, so Beverly grabs his shoulder, anchoring him.

When she holds him down he turns to her, and his face looks desperate, he says, “I have to get to him, I promised I’d keep him safe,” and Beverly knows, if there’s one thing she knows about this boy after this summer, it’s his fierce protectiveness of his brother.

She says, “I know,” and “You will,” and “Do you trust me, Bill?”

She’s fairly sure he does, but it’s still a relief when he nods, eyes wet, and stops straining to get away from her for a moment.

“ _It’s_ toying with you,” she tells Bill, “But I have an idea,” and she pulls off her backpack and takes out the last thing she brought from the clubhouse.

Just like she thought, when she opens her hands, the brightly-colored origami-paper boats begin to float up in the air around her, drifting towards Georgie, swirling first around his feet and then his legs and arms and up his body, and Beverly would have sworn she’d only grabbed a handful of Georgie’s fleet in her rushed stop by the clubhouse, but there are hundreds of boats now, whipping around him like a shield until they can hardly see his face, but they can hear is as he gasps himself awake and tears his gaze away from the terrible light that’s been holding him.

“Billy?” Georgie cries out and drops like a stone, boats falling around him like so many pointed, red and green and blue snowflakes.

No one is close enough to catch him, but Georgie sits up after a moment looking not too much the worse for wear. Bill is by his side as he does, an arm wrapped around his back, but when he’s upright and looking basically like himself, Bill turns to Beverly and asks, “How did you know to do that?”

Bev shrugs. “Georgie said It couldn’t get near him in the bath when he had them — he sounded really sure. I figured it couldn’t hurt, you know?”

She figures a little bit more than that, actually, but they’re quite literally in It’s house, and if she does understand something, she doesn’t want to let It know how much she knows, so she leaves it there. It’s strange that they haven’t seen It since It was Not Georgie and then her father and then Richie’s werewolf, and it’s starting to make her jumpy.

47)

“So we’re supposed to just…” Eddie is pretty sure he must be missing something, here, because what he’s describing sounds both very stupid and extremely unpleasant, “… _tell_ you everything we’ve ever been afraid of? Honesty hour?”

“Yes,” Bill says, and he meets Eddie’s eyes with that kind, steady, here-to-be-your-leader-now Bill Denbrough gaze and Eddie _hates_ it.

“Just everything we feel upset or bad or — or _insecure_ about, just pour it out to you, who we haven’t spoken to or thought of in over twenty years while you’ve been watching us from a distance? That’s creepy as shit, Bill.”

“It’s not our fault you forgot, Eddie,” Bill says, and he sounds sad but he also sounds _sure_ , and Eddie isn’t sure of anything right now so where does Bill get off, acting so _fucking_ certain?

“So if we all forgot, why did you three remember?”

“You forget when you leave Derry,” Mike says, looking over at Bill and Georgie. “We never left.”

“ _Why?_ ” Richie asks, all the incredulity of this fucked up little murder town in his voice, but Eddie doesn’t care about that part as much, he’s more concerned with how wildly improbable that simplistic little statement is.

“So all three of you never left town? Not for twenty-seven years? I don’t know what the average education level for hack horror writers is, but Mike, I _know_ you have to go to college to be a librarian. Graduate school, even!”

Mike laughs like he hasn’t been caught in a _lie_ leading up to what Eddie keeps turning over and over in his mind as the ultimate betrayal of this little horror story. “Alright, so we both went to school, but we both went to UMaine, so we didn’t go far, and we both had family reasons to come back fairly often on weekends, and so we got so we noticed it happening, and we thought that was dangerous, when It was due to come back again in twenty-something-years, maybe, so after school we came back here to live.”

“So you forgot sometimes,” Eddie says, because he wants to hear Mike admit it, “And then you remembered sometimes, you know that it’s possible to forget and then remember again, and you never called us? The three of you just sat here together in your little club of people who get to remember, and left the rest of us all alone?”

Nobody seems to know what to say to that, and Eddie takes a perverse kind of satisfaction in the awkward silence. Finally, Richie says, “But you weren’t alone, Eds. What about the lovely new and improved Mrs. K?”

The teasing is typical, but the odd, hesitant note in Richie’s voice isn’t, and Eddie wonders if he’s as shaken by the betrayal as Eddie is. Still, “ _Fuck_ you, Richie.”

“No, Eds, I — I actually mean it. Like, I know I’m not an expert, but isn’t that a part of the whole marriage dealio? In sickness and in health? Thou shalt not be left alone with your freaky-ass murder-clown nightmares?”

“What, you want me to admit I have a dysfunctional marriage? Fuck you, okay, I have a dysfunctional marriage. Are you happy?”

Eddie feels like somebody else in this room should have to talk at some point, to break this weird, awful tension where he’s meeting Richie’s eyes, but of the group, it’s he and Richie that are the two who are most likely to interrupt to break the tension, and they _are_ the tension, so there’s no one to draw attention away when Richie finally says, “No, man, of course not. You’re my friend, of course I’m not happy that you’re not happy.”

And that — it’s too much, Eddie needs to yell at somebody else before his body remembers how, as a little kid, he was an angry-crier. It was always infuriating, to have all that rage boil over into something people thought of as vulnerable and cute, and Eddie _will not have it happening again_ , so this time he turns to Mike again and says-yells, “You see what I fucking mean? We’ve been alone for so long I forgot how this asshole cares about people.”

Mike looks shaken — which, fucking _good_ , Eddie hopes he feels awful. Bill reaches up to rest a hand on Mike’s shoulder, and Mike takes a shuddering breath and says, “We thought — we thought it would be cruel, to make all of you remember, the whole time. It’s all so awful, and we thought it would be unfair to take away your shot at a normal life until we had to.”

When he says it like that, it sounds almost kind. Eddie still hates it.

28)

“It’s not loaded, _it’s not loaded_ ,” Mike screams out to Bill, to where Bill is holding the bolt gun to Not Georgie’s head. Bill looks down at the bolt gun, and it’s true, he knows he’s right, it _isn’t loaded_ because he lost all the ammunition, but somehow Mike thinks the emptiness of the ammunition chamber isn’t truly complete until Bill looks down at it and believes that it is.

Bill looks up from the gun and at Not Georgie, and it’s not Georgie, it’s _not Georgie_ , but Mike also knows that the real reason Bill didn’t pull the trigger isn’t because the gun wasn’t loaded, but because the target was wearing Georgie’s face. It looks up at Bill and It smiles this awful smile and holds out It’s hand to Bill, and for a second it looks like Bill is going to take It’s hand, even though actual Georgie is screaming from behind him, “That’s not me Billy, that’s not _me_ ,” and restrained from running right at the thing only by Beverly’s arm wrapped around his waist.

Yelling at Bill clearly isn’t working, and getting closer to him is off the table, too, if those massive claws coming from where Not Georgie’s legs should be are any indication, so Mike is relieved when someone finally takes a different tack, even if it _is_ , on reflection, a stupid one.

“You already _did_ that one, you stupid fucking clown,” Richie yells at the eldritch corpse of a very-much-alive eight-year-old. “Why don’t you pretend to be something your own size, for once?”

Not Georgie turns Its face towards Richie, and when It opens Its mouth this time, It drips black bile out from between Its teeth as It speaks. “Oh, I don’t think you’d like that, Richie. I don’t think you’d like that at all. Wouldn’t like your friends to know what you’re _really_ afraid of, would you?”

It’s a gambit, Mike can see that — Richie’s trying to distract, but the clown can see it, too.

“Trying to distract me so Billy can get free, Richie?” the clown says, no pretense of Georgie’s voice now, though it’s still coming out of Georgie’s face, a version of Georgie’s face with a looming-tall body and massive claws, and Mike thinks absently that it’s getting sloppy, pulling out things that aren’t scary because they’re about _them_ , things that are only scary for the very real possibility that they might stab you. Mike thinks probably this is an opportunity they should be able to exploit, but he only thinks so quietly in the back of his head, behind where the fear lives. To the rest of him, the observation doesn’t seem to make much difference.

“I’ve got him now…and I think I’d like to keep him,” It said, and It sounded so smug, horribly smug. “You can go, though — you can go, and be safe, and live free, happy lives — just leave me this one. This one robbed me of a long-awaited snack, and he owes me.”

“Billy!” George Denbrough’s shriek is shrill and deafening, and they all turn towards him where he’s crying, but it’s only Richie who then turns his face to Beverly, who’s holding onto the little boy with one arm wound tight around his chest. With his back turned to the clown, Mike can see Richie sending a tiny nod in the direction of the sling shot still clutched in Beverly’s other hand, muttering, “Hold onto him.” She nods back.

Then Richie points the baseball bat at Bill and opens his mouth, and even Mike, who has just seen behind the curtain on this particular magic trick, almost falls for the smoke screen as Richie says, “It’s your fault, Bill.”

Bill hasn’t seen what Mike has, and those big sad eyes fix on Richie like he thinks he deserves it. Behind where she’s clutching Georgie Denbrough close, Beverly has started to maneuver her slingshot, and there’s nothing here for Mike to do yet but watch.

“And now I’m going to have to kill this fucking clown,” Richie Tozier says, twirling the metal baseball bat like a baton at a football game. And when the clown starts to twist and shift, growing taller, growing fur, a slavering monster, Beverly Marsh shoves Georgie Denbrough out of her way and into Mike, and, and she swings up her slingshot, silver shining as the takes a shot that gets it right in the skull, taking off a chunk, and then the clown is melting, disappearing, gone, and before he knows it Mike is watching the sight of a Denbrough brothers reunion as Bill flings himself across the space until he’s reached Georgie.

It’s a private moment, despite the fact that they’re surrounded by everyone they know, covered in sewer muck, and surrounded by corpses, so Mike waits until Bill looks up from where he’s clutching Georgie to his chest and meets Mike’s eyes before he wraps his arms around then both.

48)

One thing that’s strange about having everyone home is that while Bill would have sworn that he remembered them all perfectly, he’s certainly forgotten some of what it takes to corral seven different people with seven different loud opinions together to get them to agree to a course of action. Bill and Mike don’t fight, really, and Georgie has always been extremely easygoing. Bill hasn’t gone into this experience thinking that the others will listen calmly to the research Bill and Mike have done, agree that the best thing to do is to share all of their deepest darkest secrets, and then walk calmly into the sewers to defeat an ancient evil — he hasn’t expected it to be _easy_ , but he also hasn’t been expecting quite this much resistance.

Eddie reiterates that they should definitely bring a gun, if they’re going to walk straight into trouble, and Bill looks up to share a moment of complete understanding with Mike. Their friends are brilliant and beautiful and _exhausting_.

“I’m just saying,” Eddie barrels on, “Isn’t this the backwoods? Can’t we get AK 47s at the fuckin’ Walmart?”

“C’mon, Eds, you know Derry’s too small to have its own Walmart, we’d have to drive all the way to Bangor at _least_ ,” Richie says, tone dripping in irony.

“Actually,” Georgie says, “I don’t know about AKs, but I’ve got a friend I can borrow a hunting rifle off of. And Mike, don’t you still have those antiques of your grandad’s?”

“The point,” Mike says, and Bill can hear the patience slipping a little in his voice, “is that brute strength was never going to be the thing to kill It, or Bev stabbing It in the head with the fence post would have done it.”

“But you’re the one who’s been saying that at least part of it has to do with the laws of bodies,” Beverly reminds him. She smiles a little conspiratorially to Bill at this, like they’re in on the joke together, but if Mike has gotten too far into his head to keep track of the internal logic of this thing over the years, then Bill has absolutely got the same problem. He can see what she means as she says it, though, now that she says it, and she’s always had an infectious smile, and way back when, the last time Bill saw her, it was the two of them leading the charge, pulling the rest of them dragging their feet behind them. Even the years of Mike-and Bill-against-the-world can’t quite erase that first moment of choice, standing in a circle in front of Eddie’s house after the first trip into Neibolt house. 

Bill mirrors her grin and says, “I do think it’s both.” He pauses after that, and he knows in an embarrassed part of the back of his mind that he’s pausing because the break in the conversation builds the tension. It’s just good storytelling. 

After a breath, Mike grins, taking his cue to ask the leading question, a little sing-song with the fact that he’s so clearly following Bill’s script. 

“What do you mean by that, Bill?” Bill smiles at him in thanks, and goes on. “So Its weakness is that it’s limited by its body, right? But its strength is that it can change that body, and the trick is to get it to hold a shape long enough to kill it as something.”

There’s a pause as they take that in, and then Eddie says, “Can we hold that thought for a minute?” and excuses himself to the restroom.

If this was a scene he was writing, Bill thinks, it would be a good moment for the otherworldly creature to strike, while they’re in disarray, all full of disagreement over how to face it. The correct idea would have already been proposed, but by an unlikely source, and dismissed by the rest of the cast, and then the thing would strike again, right in the middle of their planning session.

Instead, while _It_ is definitely involved, it’s a strike from a more mundane source that has Eddie stumbling back into the room, spilling thick, viscous red-black blood over his teeth along with the words, “Bowers is in my room.”

The effect is the same, though; it’s made very clear that _It_ is not going to allow them to sit and wait and plan until they’re ready to face It. It’s ready for them now.

29)

After, out in the sunshine, away from the Barrens and the sewers and anything that should be touched by those memories, Georgie says, “It’s going to come back, you know?”

Ben doesn’t know he knows it until he hears it, but as Georgie says it, he finds himself nodding. “We ended the cycle, didn’t we? So we have twenty-seven years till it comes back. But we didn’t really kill It, so It will.”

Bill nods and says, “And we’ll be ready for It, right George?”

Georgie nods seriously. “I saw it in the lights, we come back so we can get It next time.”

Ben doesn’t think he’s alone in never wanting to go down and face that thing ever again, but the idea of _not_ coming back, and letting It go on picking people off however It wants, is worse, so when Stanley comes towards him with the jagged edge of a broken bottle, Ben Hanscom swears.

49)

Once, It appeared to Richie as a giant eyeball. That’s what he thinks about, as he’s plummeting down to the ground out of the deadlights. After the werewolf, the time he’d hoped was a dream, it had been a giant eyeball, and Richie had told himself it was because of his glasses, because of the vulnerability of having breakable glass right in front of one of the most delicate parts of his body, but that had never been it, had it?

Richie hits the ground and then Eddie ( _Eddie_ ) was sitting over him, patting his cheek, whooping, “There he is, that’s right, Rich!” Like Richie opening his eyes again is the greatest gift he could give him, like Eddie’s giddy with him, and under Eddie’s gaze, Richie feels split wide open. _There’s more than one way to make someone vulnerable_.

He’s frozen, so it’s lucky that little Georgie Denbrough who Richie used to put up on his shoulders to see if Georgie could touch the ceiling that way, rushes in screaming like a banshee, and shoves Eddie right out of the way of a claw as it descends. The claw gets Richie, but glancingly, a long gash rather than a puncture, and he drags his dazed body further back, out of its path.

“It’s gone off-book!” Georgie shouts. “Nobody even knows enough to be afraid of scorpion clown spiders, right?”

He’s right, is the thing — the thing is changing at random, like It can’t settle on a fear, like It doesn’t know what shape to decide to be next. _We’ve got It on the ropes_ , Richie thinks, and then he thinks of how pinned in place he’d felt, only seconds before, held wide-open and vulnerable by Eddie’s eyes on him. He looks over, and Eddie is _still looking_ , and he _knows_ how to hold It in place long enough for someone to skewer it.

“That’s right,” he says. “It’s afraid now, too,” because that’s as good a place to start as any, with the fight-or-flight response. “What did you say, Mike?” he asks. “About what you and Bill saw on your culturally exploitative vision quest? It’s been here millions of years, and after the Shokopiwah that first time, we’re the first people you know of who have tried to fight back?”

“None can oppose me!” the clown-thing cries out, “I am the eater of _worlds_!”

“Nothing else could oppose you, nothing else could even _see what you were_ enough to be afraid of you because you _don’t belong here_ ,” Richie tells the clown, and oh, he knows that feeling from a hundred half-empty-bar open mic nights where he couldn’t even get a pity-chuckle, knows the feeling of deciding to be someone else for a bit because _that’s what it takes to make it in show biz, kid_. “You could have destroyed us, but you couldn’t make us afraid, you had to make yourself more like _us_ to make us afraid of you,” and as he says it, Richie laughs a little, because he can feel its truth in his own mouth.

“The clown!” Beverly shouts from a little way down the cave, and Richie grins in relief at the realization in her voice. “You turned yourself into the clown just like that poor man with the scarred face!”

“He wanted to kill, too,” the clown snarls, and as Beverly says it, It does look more _like_ the clown. “Robert Gray was an easy one to take over, you think being _human_ makes your people less monstrous?”

“Of course not.” Beverly goes on, and there is a terrible understanding in her tone, “Maybe the human monsters are worse, even. But he loved his daughter, and even you couldn’t take that out of him, you could only warp it into something awful.”

“Yes, Bevvie,” the clown says in a voice Richie never heard from the man himself because it wouldn’t have been safe for Beverly, for her father to meet any of them. As It does so, It shrinks down into a shape that’s still looming, but human-sized, just human. “He loved his daughter like your daddy loved you—”

“No,” she says like a whip-crack. “That’s where you got it wrong. Because you can mimic a lot of things, but you don’t understand love at all.”

“You think it’s a lever you can pull to get people to do what you want,” Eddie says, a lifetime of fury in his voice, “And maybe that works sometimes, but you only understand the effect, not the cause, so you can’t control it.”

“Like you couldn’t control Claude Heroux,” Mike says, leaning against the cave like he’s taken a serious hit — and by this point, Richie thinks, which of them haven’t? “You thought you had a good one, with him,” Mike says, “A man alone with his fury, with his lost love. You thought you could cut him off from everyone who ever mattered to him and he’d do your work for you, but we don’t stop being the people who loved someone just because those people are gone from us.”

“But you can’t understand that,” Richie says, only half-understanding Mike’s story. He knows enough about cadence, about line delivery, to know that this is the moment to zero in for the punch-line, though. Behind his back, where he hopes Georgie Denbrough and his shotgun can see, Richie holds his hand like he’s firing a gun, like they’re playing cops and robbers down the end of the cul-de-sac in the dying evening light in July of 1989, and then he goes in for the kill. “You could never understand that because you’re the only one of your kind, because you’ve been all alone for longer than this planet has existed, and you always will be.”

And the clown shrinks, and it shrinks, and then Richie hears the sound of Georgie Denbrough’s borrowed shotgun over his shoulder, and the shriveled, dead heart of the thing that used to be a clown explodes.

[end.]


	5. epilogue.

Bill locks the door behind him like he thinks they’ll be coming back to this, the house he and George grew up in, the house he’s shared with Mike for the better part of a decade and a half. Mike lets him, because it’s his house, really, the beginning of his nightmares and the only home Bill has ever had, and because the click of the lock feels a little like closure, and because it’s raining already. But in the back of his mind, Mike promises himself that neither he nor Bill will see this house again for at least a year, no matter how un-haunted the town gets in their absence. They’ve got a lot of world to catch up on seeing.

It’s raining already, like it has been since they’ve emerged, muddy and bloody and shaking, from the sewer system hours earlier, and Mike can’t remember rains quite like this since the year George got so hurt the town could talk about little else. The water he wades through on his way from the house to the car hits knee-height, and rushes with a current stronger than the lazy creek they used to play in as kids has ever reached, even at the height of spring runoff.

Bill has a suitcase, and he puts it into Mike’s car before reaching into his pocket for his keys and tossing the ignition key for his own car to Georgie. Mike thinks he’d have dropped the key in surprise, fumbled it for all his fairly decent skill at backlot baseball, just out of surprise. He’s not quite sure what’s going on, here; they’ve reached an ending, with the death of the fear-thing that defined both their child- and adult-lives, but they’ve never really talked about what ought to come next, not since that day in the club house when they didn’t know yet that they’d already promised away a significant chunk of their adult lives.

Mike stows his own backpack in the trunk behind Bill’s and reflects that he’s probably depriving himself of a reference, and possibly a future career in his chosen field, by skipping town without giving his notice. That’s fine, he thinks. He chose librarianship a long time ago, largely as a stepping stone in the direction of research he’s grateful not to need anymore. It was a certain amount of affinity, but also a certain amount of means-to-an-end, and Mike’s not sure where that leaves him with the job, now that he’s reached that end.

Behind Mike’s scattered thoughts, Bill is telling Georgie, “We’re going to stop by the townhouse first, touch base with the others, figure out some logistics.” Mike doesn’t remember discussing that, but it sounds sensible, and Bill sounds sure, so he doesn’t think about it much more than it takes to register Georgie agreeing to meet them there.

Georgie has Bill’s keys, so Mike slides into the driver’s seat of his own, sensible little hatchback, bought in a weird kind of defiance in college because it was so very aggressively not the car of a farmer, and looked over to the passenger’s seat in time to see Bill slide in beside him and then drop, like all the energy falling out of him as soon as Mike was behind the wheel. “Logistics, huh?” Mike asks him, a little amused, now that he thinks about it. All of their trying to be sensible, to research, to watch and wait and be on the lookout for a sign, and in the end it was Richie Tozier running his mouth and little Georgie with a shotgun that ended up saving them all. He and Bill haven’t been much help in terms of logistics at any point leading up to this one, Mike doesn’t think.

“Yeah,” Bill agrees vaguely, head drooping forward so it’s almost on the dashboard in the muddy, rain-smeared morning light. “Like, Bowers is still out there somewhere, right? Or maybe he tried to follow us into the sewers? And, you know, he could—” Bill cuts himself off with an odd noise, and when Mike looks over, he’s _laughing_ , choked, breathless little guffaws spilling from his lips. Bill looks over at Mike again, catches his eye and says, “He could _drown_ down there, in weather like this,” and then he’s cackling, he’s gasping, he’s laughing in a way that doesn’t sound quite human.

“Yeah, man,” Mike agrees, grin stretching across his own face. “That’d be a real shame.”

“And anyway,” Bill says after a moment, when he can breathe again, “I mostly just want to see them all again.”

…

Beverly has sewer in her hair and blood in her eyebrows and a wild grin on her face like she’s a child again and summer vacation is just beginning. She feels like that, a bit, too, or at least, she feels what she imagines that must have felt like, for children who didn’t fear long days spent at home more than anything the school day could possibly bring. She feels like the future is wide open, and like the days ahead of her can be as full of the people who love her, the people who follow her down ravines and into wild adventures, as she wants them to be. She looks over at Ben, who is fumbling around behind the bar in the townhouse, just because the moment she walked into the hotel’s always-empty common room, she’d flopped down onto the nearest available couch and proclaimed that she needed a drink.

He’s very clearly looking for a glass, and just as clearly exhausted, and Beverly feels not just her heart but what feels like her entire gut, her lungs, her _veins_ twist with tenderness. “Hey, new kid,” she calls out. He looks up from what he’s doing and catches her eye and she beckons him over. “Leave the glasses, bring the bottle.”

He makes his way over to her, and she tugs him down beside her, and he lets her — lets himself be tugged, be moved by her, and Beverly’s heart is so full it’s like she can’t breathe.

…

Upstairs, Richie has his shirt off, and he’s shivering in the cool of the room, looking out at where the rain is coming down behind the windowpane. Behind him, he can hear Eddie sorting through what sounds like an entire pharmacy, hunting for his first aid kit. “S’all right, Eds,” Richie tries for the third time since they’ve left the sewers, “It’s only a flesh wound, and I cleaned it out when I showered the sewer off me, anyway.”

“Shut up, _asshole_ , you are talking about an actual open wound, you don’t get to rinse some hotel shower gel over it and call it good.” Eddie had been very put out that Richie hadn’t mentioned the cut-open gash along his side until after he’d showered, and hadn’t been especially impressed by Richie’s “Let’s not go to the hospital” plan, either, so Richie thinks he probably ought to let him have this one. _This one_ he thinks, mocking, a little disgusted with himself. Like he’s ever been able to resist egging Eddie on when it might make Eddie keep paying attention to him.

“Fair enough, Doctor K,” he says, after a second, rhythm a little off. “Only one of us here went to honorary medical school, and I think we all know it wasn’t me.”

The joke doesn’t land, which is fair enough because Richie’s a hack, hasn’t been telling his own jokes on-stage for so long he’s probably forgotten how, but he isn’t expecting the obligatory token-chuckle Eddie lets out to sound so _sad_. “I was going to, you know?” Eddie says, and as he says it, Richie can hear him zipping the suitcase closed and coming up closer behind him. “Go to medical school. When we were kids, you used to call me that, and I’d think, _yeah, I could do that._ It used to make me feel, like. Strong. That I knew what the dangers were, but I could patch you guys up, I could keep you safe from it.”

“And you did, Eds,” Richie says, turning to look at him. Richie knows all about not growing up to be the person you wanted to be, or even someone you like very much, most of the time, but he also remembers that boy with the serious little face, dabbing Neosporin on Richie’s scraped-up knees like nothing could be more important in the world. “God knows we all probably would have gotten tetanus a long time before Chuckles The Clown got a shot at us, if you hadn’t been there to chase us out of the old train-yard.” And as he says it, Richie can see the memory as clearly as if it’s something he’s always known it, though three days ago, he’d have said that his childhood was a blur.

Eddie bites down on his lower lip and reaches for Richie, disinfectant in hand. “So what?” Eddie asks, and if the words are dismissive, the tone is painfully sincere. “I peaked at thirteen? And after that I wasted my life?”

It’s a thought Richie has had, walking out after a guilty one-night stand, or off a stage after saying an hour’s worth of things he can’t stand behind, doesn’t even _like_ , never mind believe, _wasted my whole life_ , like it’s a foregone conclusion, but something about hearing Eddie say it is worse, feels wrong. “Hey now, Eddie Spaghetti,” Richie says, “We’re not dead yet, okay?”

…

Bill thinks he could sleep for a hundred years, but not in this town, maybe never in this town again.

“It’s not exactly safe driving conditions,” Eddie says, which is hardly a surprise, but he says it reluctantly, and Bill thinks Eddie is only marginally more likely than the rest of them to let this stop him from getting out of town as soon as is humanly possible, safe or not. But more than that — “I don’t think I want to split up again,” Beverly says. She’s always been brave about putting things into words, and these words in particular feel plucked from Bill’s own mind.

Ben puts a hand on hers, a physical reminder that she’s not alone, but it’s Richie who speaks up. “Hey, uh. Before we start talking about going back to, like. The real world,” and it’s true that the last few days have felt impossible and dreamlike, but Bill thinks that if they weren’t also real life, then he has never had one. “Don’t you think we also owe it to Stan to let him know what happened?”

Now that Richie says it, Bill does think so. Beverly nods, too, and Bill doesn’t need to look behind him to know that Mike is signaling his agreement as well. _Lucky seven_ , one of them said, once, and they’ve used up a lifetime’s worth of luck in the last few days, but, Georgie aside, they haven’t been _seven_ since that summer.

Real life, Bill thinks, has waited patiently for this long. It stands to reason that it can wait a little longer. “So — road trip?”


End file.
